I wouldn't call it native bias, but it may be an error of adjacency instead of causality. While living in Japan (in the early 90's) it was very common to hear

I wouldn't call it native bias, but it may be an error of adjacency instead of causality. While living in Japan (in the early 90's) it was very common to hear from Japanese that their mode of operation was to copy and then improve on the copy rather than to make any great new discoveries. Also, at the time I was there, the educational system enforced strict conformity - common saying "if you see a nail sticking out, you hammer it down." In any case, I was there as an architect, and I was amazed at how the building designs there, which were typically very strange attempts at copying other styles, were horribly integrated. Sure, each part of the building was executed beautifully, but the whole was horrible. I was among many foreign architects broght in to improve on the local design talent there. This is primarily where my observation of lack of integrative ability/innovation comes form - the built forms . For the kanji discussion, even though there are many idiosyncracies about pronunciation in spelling for English and other languages, you can get pretty far phonetically. With Japanese/Chinese, you can't get far at all without learning so many separate images (except for the few words using phonetic alphabets.) As far as innovation, Toyota has revolutionized business processes with their lean system, but their car designs (the look) when they are good, are most likely done out of country. (Many car design exteriors come out of California, including the look of the Porsche Cayman and Boxter, etc) I'm seeing a pattern in my post here: maybe the memorization of all those images makes it more difficult (but certainly not impossible of course) for the language user to create visually integrative designs?