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A lot of what you say is true, but you give Japan too much credit.
I first began dabbling in fighters seriously when I visited Japan, alongside the release of CvS2 which became my first experience in tourneys.
“It appears there are no scrubs in Japan”. There are plenty of scrubs in Japan, their scrubs are just better than ours. Its like trolls on SRK and trolls that can spell on SRK; one is slightly more refined than the other but in the end they are still trolls.
I learned along a slew of other new, budding japanese players and yes, they learn defense well. But it would be more correct to say they learn the basics and building blocks of the fighters they play well, and then they grow upon those fundamentals so their more advanced strategies are that much stronger.
Also, its a given arcades still actually exist over there, unlike here where they are little more than myth. So of course, they have more experience, bigger scenes and easier time polishing their mistakes.
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Interesting. It would have been nice if back in the days when the US had an arcade scene to see if we would have beat Japan. Back in the mid 90s when Tomo was dominating, Kuni who lived in Japan said Tomo could possibly beat their best. However, keep in mind Tomo dominated the tourney scene during a time when Guile was still quite a dominate play in Street Fighter. So I would think that Tomo playstyle was built more around defense as well. There are no vids of the guy playing or anything like that. So it’s really hard to say how good he was. However Jeff Schaefer and Mike Watson both played with him, and people say that their Guile playstyle most closely resembles Tomo. Still would be nice to know, too bad we never will. However, being nearly 30 now, I was around back when SF first started up. Back in the days we did learn about normals first (simply because no one could do specials back then). And then once we learned normals, we learned a more defensive playstyle. However when people started learning combos, offense became the trademark American style.
And I still do believe that Americans are more inspired by defense. If you were to get the average American into Street Fighter, whose video would you show? Would you show them vids of Poongko with an aggressive Ryu? Or would you show them vids of a more methodical and defensive Ryu? Overall, I believe more Americans would be bored to tears by “proper” Ryu play, and would gravitate to something more flashy.
