After reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.

A list consisting entirely of fictional works (one by an American who has never lived in Japan even) is not a good basis for claiming to understand a culture.

Seriously, Cryptonomicon is a bizarre thing to put on this list. I like the it a lot, but none of that book takes place in Japan and the closest intersection is Japanese soldiers during World War II, with a brief participation of a single fictional Japanese company in the modern section of the book.

Japanese people are just people. They have a unique culture... Like literally every other identifiable culture on earth.

I love Cryptonomicon but it engaged in that distinctly American brand of orientalism when it got into Japanese soldiers killing themselves and whatnot.

There are probably better sources than those two. What's next, citations from Enoch Root?