I'm not sure if you have ever been to NYC but an interesting observation I have had with Gino Sorbillo is the pizza in Napoli is very good, but he/they opened a restaurant in NYC and it's absolutely average at best.
I assume they import everything, but quality wise, the places are polar opposites.
Also curious your thoughts of Da Michele?
On the Netflix show ugly delicious one of the chefs explain supposedly in Naples chefs will choose their mozzarella freshness by the hour (e.g. 6 hours or 12 hours) but to make "authentic" Neapolitan pizza with Neapolitan mozzarella you're not going to get Mozzarella fresher than 7 days old...
Bingo. Produce and ingredients are generally very high quality in Italy, because people care about and make their purchases based on that, rather than simply looking at how much they're getting at a given price and how good it looks on the shelves.
the cheese is the hardest part of the pizza to replicate outside of italy for sure, you can easily buy high quality imported olive oil, flour, and san marzano tomatos.
Japan have decent local dairy (Hokkaido milk) and their overall attitude to produce is similar to Italy which probably is a big contributor to their food culture
I think that heavily depends on where your circle is eating at in both places.
Bland will NOT be your problem.
However, you have to understand that a lot of the US really doesn't deal well with food that isn't bland--a holdover from WWII rationing and canned foods, probably. IIRC, McDonalds(?) went through a huge engineering process to attempt to add an ingredient to their pipeline. They found that adding cucumber was fine, but avocado was a step too far for the midwest.
That's something I'd love to read in more details about. Personally, I'd say avocado is a step too far in anything that isn't fruit salad. But so is (pickled) cucumber. I wish they'd remove it from their burgers altogether. The reasoning is, pickled cucumber overwhelms everything else with its sour flavor. McD burgers I experienced (in several countries, Europe and Asia) have a balanced composition of tastes, and that slice of cucumber there is as if someone threw a grenade into it. I usually hunt it down and eat it with my first bite, so that I can enjoy the rest of the burger in peace.
this has definitely happened to tomatoes. Supermarket tomatoes vs heirloom varieties are night and day
And for a different type of pizza but honestly my favorite pizza on Earth, try the Portobello pizza at Mediterraneo on the UES. They have no idea how good that pizza is otherwise they'd turn the whole place into a pizzeria and just do that everyday