... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace.
I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected until openly questioned, at which point it turns almost automatically into guilt; but it doesn't mean it's not "foundational" - in fact, it's much more entrenched, it's just that the act of questioning it carries so much more weight on all sides (an unfair accusation, if determined, would be extremely shameful) that nobody wants to go there until absolutely necessary.
They just play the game with a slightly different set of practical rules.
Then what is?
Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the government has said something (and it's likely that it was the big companies that control the politicians that told them to say it).
There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing, one is when the government had to do the same to force companies to let/get employees to use their holiday entitlements. Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here - the moment you accept that you understand so much more about the culture, in much the same way you won't understand Buddhism if you use a mental model constructed out of your understanding of Christianity.