I've heard people unironically say that Asian people can only be creative in the West because of freedom or some shit. At least that's a step up from the outright racists who claim only white people are capable of creativity.
I mean, to some extent it's "true" solely because of how standardized Asian education systems are and how much they actually test capability.
In contrast, American education is a fucking joke. But, by extension, Americans get more time to jack off and do other shit, so from that definition I'm fairly sure creative output in the US would be higher per-capita for people in high school, at least.
Comrade, I think this is a flawed take. Even if we're only taking about the East Asian countries, China, Korea, and Japan hardly have the same system in either teaching style or curriculum.
Also, "creativity" doesn't necessarily arise out of boredom. Sure, someone might get bored and write a story or make a tik tok vid, but there are also many forms of creativity that involve a lot of hard work and support systems. Creative things like plays and orchestras don't tend to arise spontaneously of boredom.
No, but they're unified in how they evaluate and reward a "good" education:
China has gaokao, South Korea has CSAT, and Japan has the common test. All of these are unified by the fact that they directly evaluate scholastic ability (unlike the ACT/SAT), are substantially harder than the American equivalent, and more directly correspond to university admissions.