Ok maybe you can answer this
Why are the Japanese so easily intimidated?
I am watching Prince of Tennis and people are wetting their pants because one guy can play tennis really well.
It's not really cultural. Its bad writing. It's been a bit since I've read/looked up stuff for Prince of Tennis, but it's sport anime, shonen.
So you have this problem. You have a character who is doing X, and his performance at X is outstanding/extraordinary/beyond-normal-human-limits.
How do you show/tell this?
That question is very hard to answer. Now, how, sadly, a lot of Shonen anime/magna decide to answer this question, is by telling, instead of showing. And in all form of writing, the better (and generally harder) option is to show over tell.
So they convey to the audience that character is doing X super-special-awesome by giving you the reaction to bystanders, telling us how we should be perceiving the performance of X.
Hence, why a lot of bystanders are just overly excitable.
I'm currently writing a shonen comic, and the excitable bystander is a trope that I've sworn to completely ignore (unless I can satirize it, or advert it). I've also sown to completely ignore time compression training.
And this has proven very difficult to show difference in abilities between characters, but I've come up with a few, hopefully visually dynamic, answers to the question.
Part of my answer, is through the use of mach cones. The higher deflection of the mach cone, the faster & harder hitting the character is.
The other use, is using environmental clue to show when the characters have enter shonen speed. Major inspiration for that comes from Jet Li's movie, The One.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=O4oi9i7Hy10#t=277sThere they show the electrical spittle happening at normal speed, then the two Li's enter shonen speed and the sparks slow down. Showing us, they're moving at shonen speed.
Now contrast that with telling us, they would have used the black guy there, reacting to the two characters at shonen speed saying something like, "Crap, I can even see them move. They're one intermixed blur! Its unreal!"