It's one thing when folks go around claiming "kaizen is the Japanese word for 'continual improvement'", but another when they decide to just invent the corresponding etymology.

From a "life transformation" website:

The Kaizen philosophy is drawn from the Japanese word kai which means “continuous”

NO. The kai half of kaizen does not in any way mean or even suggest "continuous". Nor is it a "word".  Read more about Poor misunderstood kaizen

Speaking of language (and I sometimes am), here's a bit that I appreciated from the A.Word.A.Day mailing list:

In a forwarded email I came across an article with the title: 14 wonderful words with no English equivalent. The article lists words from various languages and their meanings, for example:

Rhwe (Tsonga, South Africa): to sleep on the floor without a mat, while drunk and naked. Read more about "OMG! They have a word for that!"

Kind correspondent D.H. points out (quite some time ago; my bad and my slow) another online article sporting culturologist silliness: "Why Japan prefers pets to parenthood" from Ruth Evans and Roland Buerk at The Guardian.

What's silly in there? Well, we immediately start with a bit of that most classic of delusions, the belief that my mindset equals my arbitrarily defined tribe's mindset: Read more about Debunked: "OMG Japan prefers pets to children"

Kind correspondent Mart sent me a link (to which I make this shamefully late reply...) to commentary by director Alex Cox (Repo Man) on the topic of Kurosawa. Under the heading "More tired clichés about Japan":

It's a very brief bit, so thankfully there's not too much goofiness in there by volume. But there is that ever-popular quoting of the oh-so-tired proverb, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down". Sigh. Read more about "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down"

In A dose of dumb: Asians can't understand Western music, I noted a clueless TV comment about whether Asian musicians are unable to fully comprehend "Western" music, plus TIME magazine's posing of the same question regarding none other than famed Boston Symphony conductor Seiji Ozawa (!). My mocking of the comments and my return question ("Why the hell would an 'Asian' have any less comprehension of 'Western' music than a 'Westerner'?") are on the money.