No, that was a total joke.
Listening to Japanese people on certain things can be a howl. I was listening with my daughters to these Japanese teen girls who were going on some teen shuojo show and they all said how sincere they were and how hard they would try to do a good job. I lived once in an area with lots of Japanese families (sent here by their companies to work in New York) and they were all like that. I rarely met any Japanese I didn't like.