It's probably a small part of why Asians are better at math. The more salient reason is that Asian have a reputation of working harder than anyone. That's why you see Asian succeeding in the west in acquiring high status jobs and high level education more than anyone. They valued formal education more highly than anybody.

However, just because Japan and China and South Korea work harder doesn't mean they win outright all the time. For example, Samsung is the winner in many area, but they are also one of the foot soldiers for google, and they are not really good at the kind of innovation that make Apple famous.

The US may have poorly educated students in math, and our programmers may be relatively less formally educated. We still kick ass, for some reason or another