The "Japan is no different from any other country" trope is just as inaccurate as the "wacky Japan" trope and in my experience has actually overtaken the original in online discussions (though news articles clearly still focus on the original).

Making a generalized story from cherry-picked anecdotes is an incredibly common strategy for journalists writing about anything. Sometimes it might actually match more general trends and sometimes not; you can't say without real statistics, which in most cases don't exist or aren't accurate anyway.

No one's tracking it carefully, so who knows if bullying in Japan is actually worse or just picked up in the zeitgeist more. But it's ridiculous to pretend like Japanese school culture isn't drastically different from that of most western countries.

In Japanese society, historically, ritual suicide was accepted as an "honorable" way to die under otherwise shameful circumstances. It seems pretty natural that, with such a cultural legacy, Japanese people (including children) would be more willing to resort to suicide.

Reinforcing your comment, the fallacy here is in assuming that the factors affecting suicide rates among Western children are identical to the factors for Japanese children, and therefore bullying in Japan must be particularly atrocious to cause the high baseline suicide rate.

You are right, even asking people from a country directly can give a really false impression due to the pattern you describe. As someone who has lived both in the US as well as two european countries for equal parts of my life I know very well how easily views can become distorted by listening to single cases that are not representative.

Yeah having moved to China from France, I was expecting to meet aliens honestly, and ended up concluding like you there are no essential differences between cultures.

Everything is essetially the same with some limited number of levers being pulled a bit further: girls want to marry a little bit earlier, parents are a little bit more worried abt kids, politicians a bit more corrupt, racism is targeted at different colors in a different hierarchy, all that jazz, but all the patterns I was used to in France simply fit China very well and I didnt find it so difficult to just brush off the odd difference and adapt.

My Chinese parents in law also discovered I have the same strengths and flaws any other Chinese guy their daughter could have found :D

The modern media landscape is sub-optimal.

Seeing all these surveys that show that the more you consume media the less you know is extremely sad. I don’t think there are any short term solutions.