To be more specific, perhaps I should've emphasized that "modern" Asian cultures have questionable tastes, which is in direct contrast to traditional Asian sensibilities. I feel that modern Asian cultures are too busy imitating what's trendy in the west. It doesn't help the fact that instability of the past century made people lose faith in their indigineous cultures, while the western culture has evolved quite a bit since to adapt to changes of the world, thus leaving a big gap to catch up.

I'd venture that the vast portion of the old Asian cultures are appreciated now-a-days merely for their exotic aspects, even by Asian people themselves. Whatever is preserved for practical reasons don't always fit in a coherent manner, there are plenty of rough edges to work out.

I guess a bad analogy would be that Asian culture is like Unix, Apple is Europe, Windows is USA, China is BSD, and Japan is Ubuntu. The kernel is the philosophy, command line is the traditional culture, GUI is the pop culture, and the internet is globalization. Windows eventually took over and became more accessible over time with its killer GUI apps. For the time being, Unix lacks the ecosystem to build killer GUI apps, so they created Wine to run Windows apps. There are also plenty of native Unix GUI apps that sprang up, but most are created in response to their existing commercial counterparts, and many of their GUIs are imitations. FreeBSD has been around for a while, went through several regime changes, and is still kinda authoritarian with its userland programs. Ubuntu is later to the game, has the most success in adapting to modern GUI needs, but there's still some distance to go to catch up to Apple and perhaps Windows. Even though Unix is weak in GUI stuff, it's strong as servers, especially since the internet became popular.

Sorry about the silly analogy, perhaps I need to take a nap. :)