Supposedly the group is more important than the individual in "Eastern" cultures, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170118-how-east-and-wes... so it's perhaps curious that Korea is the outlier in rating "family" relatively low.
> Generally speaking - there are many exceptions - people in the West tend to be more individualist, and people from Asian countries like India, Japan or China tend to be more collectivist.
One thing Japan is not is "pre-industrial"!
As an aside, you labeled the article as superficial, but I thought it actually went deeper into some nuance. For instance, it mentions that in Hokkaido, people tend to be more individualistic, possibly because it's a "frontier" of sorts compared to the rest of Japan. And the US is largely populated by people who (themselves or their ancestors) went to a similar "frontier".