Having worked with a lot of Japanese programmers, this rings true, but I think it says more about how Japanese companies are run than anything else. There are a couple of interrelated factors that come together here. Typical Japanese companies tend to be very conservative in regard to established technologies. Also, lack of timely Japanese-language materials only makes the problem worse. Even if there is official documentation or an O'Reilly book in Japanese, not having the surrounding ecosystem of blogs and tutorials makes it pretty hard to get familiar with a new technology. Even for mature technologies, the documentation for the newest release or the newest editions of books may not be translated for a while, which further slows things down. Of course, this problem isn't limited to Japanese.

At the small Japanese company where I worked there was a pretty stiff resistance to using full-blown web frameworks. The main argument was that it would take too much time to train people to use the framework, and that open-source frameworks were somehow unreliable. So they ended up poorly re-inventing several wheels (like using plain text files and locking for storing data, or a crude templating system) without first checking out the available open-source alternatives. It often felt like we were working at the wrong level of abstraction. On a more practical note, most of our clients used shared hosting with such draconian limitations and ancient server software that it would have been pretty difficult to use some of the modern frameworks even if we'd wanted to. (Think servers with PHP 4 and FTP access only.) I don't think everywhere is as bad as that was, but in my experience not-invented-here syndrome seems to be pretty common here in Japan.