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As Huntington has observed, Westerners tend to confuse modernization—defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization—with Westernization. But societies other than Japan have become modern without becoming very Western

Relationships, on the other hand, involve, tacitly or explicitly, a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way

Because of their relative ambiguity, it’s harder to remember verbs; verbs are more likely to be altered in meaning than nouns when a speaker communicates to another person or when one person paraphrases

How is it possible that Easterners today have relatively little interest in categories, find it hard to learn new categories by applying rules about properties, and make little spontaneous use of them for purposes of induction? Why are they so much more inclined to consider relationships in their organization of objects than Westerners are?

The lack of interest in classes of objects sharing the same properties is consistent with the basic scheme that the ancient Chinese had for the world. For them, the world consisted of continuous substances. So it was a part-whole dichotomy that made sense to them. Finding the features shared by objects and placing objects in a class on that basis would not have seemed a very useful activity

Why is it then that Westerners rely so much more heavily on personality traits in explaining behavior? The answer seems to be that Easterners are more likely to notice important situational factors and to realize that they play a role in producing behavior

Westerners are the protagonists of their autobiographical novels; Asians are merely cast members in movies touching on their existences.

The combative, rhetorical form is also absent from Asian law. In Asia the law does not consist, as it does in the West for the most part, of a contest between opponents. More typically, the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is not fairness but animosity reduction—by seeking a Middle Way through the claims of the opponents.

Though both Chinese and Japanese are required to conform to move smoothly through their daily lives, the Chinese are said to chafe under the requirements and the Japanese actually to enjoy them. The Japanese are held to share with the Germans and the Dutch a need for order in all spheres of their lives; the Chinese share with Mediterraneans a more relaxed approach to life

Though social constraints are in general greater on both Chinese and Japanese than on Westerners, the constraints come primarily from authorities in the case of the Chinese and chiefly from peers in the case of the Japanese. Control in Chinese classrooms, for example, is achieved by the teacher, but by classmates in Japan

The concern with abstraction characteristic of ancient Greek philosophy has no counterpart in Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophers quite explicitly favored the most concrete sense impressions in understanding the world. In fact, the Chinese language itself is remarkably concrete
The Chinese are disinclined to use precisely defined terms or categories in any arena, but instead use expressive, metaphoric language

Individual rights in China were one’s “share” of the rights of the community as a whole, not a license to do as one pleased.

The Chinese were concerned less with issues of control of others or the environment than with self-control, so as to minimize friction with others in the family and village and to make it easier to obey the requirements of the state, administered by magistrates

Why do Western infants learn nouns at a much more rapid rate than verbs, whereas Eastern infants learn verbs at a more rapid rate than nouns? Why do East Asians group objects and events based on how they relate to one another, whereas Westerners are more likely to rely on categories?

Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving. East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another