Last night I watched a documentary about the psychological/philosophical/semiotical differences between the west and the far east.
One hypothesis that some scholars from both hemispheres proposed was that westerners were more likely to clearly seperate different parts of reality (most notably evil & good) and were more affirmative of light, hope, etc.; while the Japanese were more likely to accept the yin (the dark part of yin/yang duality) and to perceive reality as something that has to be unified somehow.

Also, they interviewed some convicted Japanese canibal who was released from jail but who expressed his wish to die, as him being alive forced him to constantly be reminded of his guilt of killing (the woman he ate). He was also filmed meeting a young (and really pretty) woman who had a sadism/torture/death fetish. She told a story about how she dug out an animal corpse she had buried with a friend a few days before (when she was very little), then sticking her hand in the warm, decaying and maggot infested body and how she felt total ecstasy from that. She also said that inflicting pain on men, cutting them with razors, drinking their blood, etc. were giving her exceeding levels of lust.

Later, both of them were filmed in an apparment, talking about cannibalism. The canibal said he'd like to be eaten by the girl, and how he dreamt of that. The girl said she thought eating the one you love and be eaten by the one you love would be a very intimate experience and that she'd like to die that way.

Another notable thing was the Ajase complex, as proposed by Kosawa, a Japanese student of Freud. They talked a lot about different conceptions of motherhood in east & west.
I also liked the part where somebody mentioned that males were mostly striving for "small perfections" by excluding everything perceived as imperfect and how that limits males typically, while females are more capable of accepting and incorporating more parts of reality, but as they are also able to fail, they usually end up in much bigger heaps of confusion if they do.