Almost any time someone tries to make a point about a culture based on their language, ignore them. Languages, for the most part, evolve on their own, independent of cultural considerations. For example, in Spanish, the word for house (casa) is female, just like (almost?) all nouns in Spanish are gendered. This does not mean that gender plays a stronger role in Spanish speaking cultures than in cultures that speak a less gendered language, it is simply the way the language evolved.
It is worth pointing out that English also lets you omit the subject in some circumstances, namly commands. For example, we consider "clear your room" to be a complete sentence, despite the fact that it omits the subject, "you".
English almost always drops the pronoun in the imperative, for example like Portuguese and the familiar form of you in German. English doesn't really ever drop the subject of the sentence otherwise...
Sure, it does. If you're talking casually with friends, it's pretty common to drop the initial pronoun, especially when it's implied from context... which is exactly what happens in Japanese, except the context is larger.
It's another "theory about Japanese" (日本人論), people making stuff up that makes the Japanese sound unique, like that Japanese are descended from different apes than other races, or that Japan is the only country with four seasons.
Every country or people have their own ideas about how they are awesome, but I think I noticed it here because I'm an outsider.
I think in the end 日本人論 is just another form of supremacy, in this case Japanese. Notice the contrast to American exceptionalism, where a reason for USA Number 1 is often not needed, whereas nihonjinron usually requires some reasoning as to why the Japanese language is superior, or why Japanese brains are better, or why Japanese culture is exceptional. It is a very self-conscious way of exceptionalism :)
To be honest, I'm quite sick of any cultural glorification from any country. But given how Japan never went through a cleansing after their fascism (unlike east/west-germany after '45 and '68) I can understand that there is not a lot of self-awareness in that regard.
In some sense the youth is trying to distance itself from the problematic past by becoming apathetic consumerists.
Every time one of these articles crop up, I feel that someone is viewing Japanese through some heavily rose tinted glasses.
I think you mean "inferred". Japan is a "high context" culture in Edward Hall's theory, meaning that context in general is an important guide to behaviour, in contrast with other more explicit cultures.
A majority of Spanish sentences leave their subjects implied. I think French, Catalan, Latin, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese have mostly implied subjects as the old Latin roots make it easy.
But you'll find most spoken English sentences have I or You or a grammatically empty placeholder ("that is..." without antecedent or "there is...") as subjects. That's why other languages can omit them. It's pretty easy to guess which of those you mean so English could omit them eventually, too, with no loss of specificity.
But in Spanish, information about the subject is left in the sentence. "Lo leí" cannot have any subject but me, and "caminaba por la calle" could only be me, him, or her. In Japanese, the information about the subject is substantially more indirect. For example, in "昨日サボったわよ" the subject could be almost anyone, but the speaker is a woman and she is probably talking to a friend or family member.
You're on track with the "gramatically empty placeholder". We have expletive pronouns, like "it" in "it is raining", which one could consider to only serve grammatical purpose—it is only in the sentence precisely because the sentence must have a grammatical subject, not because the sentence has a subject in any semantic sense. There is some disagreement about this, however.
