Not really. The need for maintenance occurs when a specific "Thing" has been around for long enough, and when the institutions, schools of thought that sustain that Thing persist for long enough. When there are radical, rapid political/economic/political changes, "maintenance" and the need for maintenance goes away. This article focusses on maintenance of industrial artifacts, and nowhere in recent times have industrial artifacts (boats, lifts, software), the companies that produce them, and the living standards they create, and the governments that encourage them been continuously existent longer than the "Western countries" (since the early 1800s at least). If you were to look outside the sphere of industrial artifacts, for example at old religious buildings - churches, mosques, temples - you'll see solid examples of good maintenance all over the world. The Koran, a literary artifact, for example, has been well-maintained for over a thousand years across the world by a mostly pre-industrial society.
TLDR: Keeping something running isn't just a "Western" thing - but keeping industrial products running is certainly Western, because only the West has seen a continuous and sustained industrial movement for over 200+ years.
There's something to be said for that.
Nonetheless, it does diminish the quotation.
I don't think anyone would suggest Germany didn't perform a minor miracle by rebuilding as quickly as they did (with massive support), but the Russians went from having half their country burned to the ground, to a world superpower (also with a large amount of support), in a shorter time span than it took West Germany to return to pre-war industrial levels.
p.s. many parts of eastern europe has been destroyed during the war as well; and was getting rebuild themselves.
When I was young I heard a lot of crazy stories about the Russians in Germans (I grew up in the Erzgebirge mountains where the Russians mined the Uranium for their atomic bombs, think of an Eastern 20th century gold rush), some of those stories are how entire production lines were moved onto trains and to the Soviet Union nearly over night (they had a lot of experience with this since a few years earlier the Soviet Union basically moved their entire military production a few thousand kilometers eastward, out of the war zone).
At least, that's what I got out of it.
Yep, no other cultures maintain anything.
TL;DR: Japan is nice.
("Whiteness" is not simply about skin colour. There's a fascinating/ugly history of how various immigrant groups to America became "white")
In Japan they are treated as basically disposable.
True, but was also devastated by a war that allowed rebuilding almost from scratch.