Your Japan organization is well managed. Leadership is the job nobody asked it to do.
The preparation is better than yours. Nobody disagrees in the room. The decision was made before the meeting, among people who were not in it. Nothing new starts until every question has an answer. If you run a Japanese organization, or depend on one, this will be familiar.
Read as personality, it looks like timidity. Read as culture, it looks permanent. Read as capability, it looks like a hiring problem. It is none of the three. Measured on the same scale across 20 countries and more than 9,000 manufacturers, the best-managed firms on average are American, Japanese and German. The operating discipline you rely on is real.
What is thin is the second job. John Kotter separated them in 1990: management copes with complexity and produces order; leadership copes with change and sets direction. Among 204 business-unit heads at firms listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, leaders who set direction and moved people mattered about twice as much to business results as leaders who managed by targets and rewards.
This paper sets out the four states an organization can be in, why hierarchy earned its place in Japan and why every one of those conditions reverses on a cross-border team, two organizations that changed their results without touching the org chart, and four changes a manager can make without a budget or a reorganization.