[jdtang13]

I completely agree. Foreign culture analyses like this are always tinged with bias and an incurable desire to find little small-picture justifications. I'm sick and tired of seeing every random quirk of Japanese people being explained as "Shinto this, Buddhism that"; it's such an oversimplification. The interior lives of human beings are built upon perhaps 1,000,000 variables, not just 3 variables.

The writing is in English, published by someone who spent an entire life growing up in the West. And, as you mentioned, this "returning item phenomenon" seems not to be the case in modern China, even in the cities.

If you want to even begin to describe Eastern culture in English, maybe take a look at how hard it was, and still is, to articulate the internal world of the Russians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_soul

[dtwest]

I interpreted this particular article's main point as being:

Don't assume Japanese people are more honest than people in other countries, there are many social and cultural factors at play that influence behavior.

Generalizing a group of people is almost always inaccurate, and often frustrating to read, but I don't think this article is an egregious example of that. This is a fluff piece to get people interested in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, don't mistake it for serious cultural analysis.