Thanks for the perspective -- I would have guessed exactly the opposite, using the logic that many Asian societies have highly formal and even ritualized notions of hierarchy and authority, and that asking "why" in such a place could be tantamount to questioning that authority. But maybe it's different when everyone is at the same spot in the hierarchy.
Don't get me wrong. The consensus attainment rituals/processes I found there (Japan, mid-80s~mid-90s) were mind-numbingly slow/tedious/inefficient.
But, in companies that manufactured products intended to compete in the global marketplace (and not something intended to meet some local need), the internal processes for doing root-cause analysis of design, manufacturing or even business model defects was pretty direct/efficient/ruthless and impersonal. To me that makes some sense: If I were on a team of 100 NASA engineers, all of us armed with slide-rules, trying to send some people to the moon and back, I wouldn't want feelings (or social standing) to get in the way of the process of verifying that the calculations were correct.
