They revise every aspect of the operation until it blends seamlessly with the environment.
This is more an east asian hypothesis, but there is a popular study (that I can’t find in my notes somehow, even though I know I’ve read about it 2-3 times in books) where east asians demonstrate greater attention to the background and europeans more to the foreground, proven in the context of taking a photograph. May be an indicator that they do less sensory filtering. It was supposed to be connected to 5-HTTLPR, but that gene took a beating during the replication crisis so be cautious with this lead.
This lends a different perspective than pure asian perfectionism. An asian holism.
Consider traditional east asian music. It is commonly pentatonic. This is a “perfect” musical system, in the sense that it is a flawless system. We give children 5-keyed toy pianos because there is a lower bound on how bad the music can be. In the western system you can make a lot of very bad, very dull music- in terms of constraint it is a flawed system. But in the western system you can construct far more elaborate forms of tension and contrast. All the flaws are pivots, points of leverage that let you reach deeper into the chaos of possibilities. It is a larger musical system.
You also see this with the western willingness to use chord progression for tension/release. The Japanese and a lot of other non-western cultures do let the instruments play different versions of the same melodies (heterophony).
Does east asian “transparency” also fit, where they want to hear each individual instrument? We have voice leading and similar western musical practices, where music theorists have argued the joy of listening is in the subtle mental puzzle of tracking the separate instruments/voices. Can we honestly attribute their heterophony and transparency to their need for orderly delineation, whereas western voice leading demonstrates a need for a challenge to impose order upon?
I feel as though it is easy to characterize these things too confidently and simply. Doubt my conclusions.
Schopenhauer and Hegel might have some interesting perspectives similar to this.
Some people focus on Japan’s differences as originating from American conquest, making them think of themselves as western. Why wouldn’t that also happen with South Korea? Should be comparing Japan to South Korea?