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I recently heard an interesting explanation for why East Asians are more likely to wear masks than other ethnic groups that doesn't rely on broad claims about culture or personality (or maybe is just upstream of those factors): smaller noses. The claim is that because East Asian noses are typically not as large as those of other races and a lot of the discomfort of wearing a mask comes from pinching or restrictions around the nose, East Asians physically feel less discomfort when wearing masks and therefore are less likely to object to doing so. I'm not sure how much explanatory power this holds vs being a cute story, but it does strike me as being a bit more parsimonious than alternative explanations like "Mongoloids are naturally subservient because <insert evopsych narrative>" and it is something most people wouldn't think of immediately because they only have first-hand knowledge of one nose size (rhinoplasties notwithstanding) and implicitly assume that everyone else has roughly the same facial-topographical experience.
In Japan, it's simple: it's because everything is like that there. Normie Japanese people take a certain pride in being "normal," i.e. following all the spoken and unspoken rules. There's no real democratic tradition over here, no concept of "consent of the governed," and certainly no American-style anti-government/anti-establishment sentiment. If this sounds like I'm being uncharitable, consider that Japanese people IME mostly see this as a good thing. They seem to see the U.S. as violent, dangerous, unpredictable, and atomized, the same way an American might think of, say, a Brazilian slum.
Chinese people (in my now somewhet dated experience) tend to follow the letter of the law while unspeakably violating the spirit of the law whenever it suits them. So any significant mask wearing there is probably only done in places where people are getting filmed or watched. There are probably a significant number of Chinese people who mask up because they believe that corona will kill them, their mom, and their dog if they get it, similar to leftist hypochondriacs and tinfoil hatters in the U.S. I met many otherwise normal, sometimes well-educated Chinese folks who had normal beliefs about most things but insane paranoid beliefs about one or two things because the CCP/Global Western Conspiracy (depending on their political leaning) was covering up the truth.
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