Anyway... You seem to have some pretty arrested ideas about Japanese behaviour, so I won't try to force you out of them, as mine are just as arrested. However, since coming to Japan and getting out of the teaching business, I've broached the subject a number of times with a number of people from teenage to old age by asking the same simple question: do you consider yourself an expressive person and do you think that Japanese in general are expressive (word for word, no kidding)? I still have to get an affirmative to both parts of the question. But that may just be the people I hang around with, as I don't consider drunken and/or teenage behaviour to be representative of society as a whole... Expression is everything--tone, face, demeanor. Japanese lack two of the three according to your reasoning and experience. If passion is not part of an expressive demeanor and passion is not an emotion, then I don't know what is...