It's really difficult to read about this kind of thing and maintain an appropriate feeling of cultural relativism without wanting go "oh Japan" or in my case "oh Korea". There's been many times with my family and friends a seemingly intractable situation will come up that a Westerner would simply resolve with a bit of a Western Rock'n'Roll "well fuck 'em" attitude and get on with life. As a Westerner, I find it incredibly frustrating at times. But obviously it's more complicated then that and when I try to see things through my family and friend's cultural lens it all makes a kind of sense.
On the flip side, I think lots of Western behavior is explained by an insatiable desire for group membership -- despite social expectations of individuality (especially for Americans).
People do all kinds of weird behaviors, bizarre clique joinerisms like wearing crazy fashions, or obsess over the moment they turn old enough to join the Marines or take on group-specific behavior patterns, and just like with 情 this mood and desire seems indescribable to them (I don't know of any satisfactory word in English for it). But you can go to any public place and look at groups of people who all dress, act and try to be as "the same" as possible as their clique-mates.
And then you end up with the strangest of all joiner group identities, the ones made up of "individuals" who strive obsessively to be "individuals" just exactly like all the rest of their clique-mates. Hipsterism seems to be a particularly well known variant of this, but there are others.
I suspect a similar psychological mechanism is at play, but just on opposite ends of the spectrum.