Quiet Japanese

I recently read a book about India. An interesting thing is mentioned in the book. It is that when an international session or conference would be held, it would be difficult to let Indian stop speaking and let Japanese speak.
Moreover, I have heard an interview of a Japanese junior high school principal. He said, “The students are relatively good at learning words and memorizing a lot of things as knowledge. These are the questions that have an answer obviously. For example, the name of an era, equation of math, name of historical person, etc. However, they are not good at saying their opinion and discussing about problems that solution is not one.
In fact we don’t have enough lessons about speech, discussion, or debating with some issues at school. This does not mean that we don’t have our opinions. We did not get used to insist our opinion to other people.
We have thought it was good thing that everyone has same sense of value. Since Wa (harmony) was important in our society, we haven’t accepted and agreed with the their unique and different opinion with everyone easily. We shut out unique sense or remarkable behavior from our society. The remarkable behavior got even an aim of discrimination in community. In result, we have hesitated about saying our opinion to other people.
Now our situation is changed. Harmony or cooperation is still important, however, we can say our own opinion that is different with the opinion of almost people in front of people freely. Because we knew that it was a personality and unique personality is precious in every field.
Our communication ability in English might be one of obstacles in international society. But we should insist our opinion about various issues to the world.