Well, anecdotally... As a member of a youth program I spent quite a bit of time around elders of the native population of Canada. These cultures have a pretty sophisticated system of refining and passing on knowledge, which I found fascinating to participate in. I found that fellow program members who were very immersed in the western system of scholarship had a very hard time benefiting from the Native system of scholarship. Assumptions that come out of the Western system of scholarship, such as around the value of debate or abstraction, just don't translate well. It required a different attitude to learning, one I was probably more prepared for than my peers in part due to my time studying Japanese martial arts. There are cultural assumptions around how knowledge is discovered and perpetuated that are so deeply ingrained it's hard to imagine they'd be different in a different culture.

Now, the Canadian native population has lost a huge portion of its cultural base, they essentially have to adapt to the Western model. But Japan's system has experienced no such widespread damage. I don't know much about it, but I could see there being the same kind of deep differences with the western system that make moving products of thought between them difficult. Not just language barriers that make debate difficult, but assumptions such as the proper role of debate. The Academia is a common ancestor to most existing systems of scholarship today. Japan's system doesn't share it, so the water Japanese scholars swim in could be very different from the water the rest of us are used to.