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Japan is a collective-oriented society, as are China and India, albeit all in different ways. The US is an individualist society, as is the UK and much of the rest of Europe, although most other European countries have more collectivist tendencies than Britain.
Having moved from the UK to Japan, I expected to find a more collegiate and cooperative attitude in the universities here than at home. However, that does not seem to be the case.
While the UK in the past 40 years has undergone a shift away from the university as a self-governing collective of individual scholars and moved (too far, in the opinion of many) towards a top-down, managed, corporate structure, in Japan universities are still heavily controlled by powerful professors.
So much so, in fact,...