do you have any statistics to back up the assertion? I mean, knowing more people of one culture who play chess than those who you know of another culture who play chess is meaningless.
I wonder why Japanese don't play chess as much as Chinese do...
Sort:
There are more Chinese than Japanese, so more Chinese players.
Chinese are tought to forget our culture for many years and follow Russian (Mao's perido) and then American(revolution and open). So the chess was introduced in China and wildly known.
Maybe now much of Chinese are going to recover the builty of our long history such as GO or Chinese (chess) XiangQi but it last not too long.
Japanese are better in keeping and enhancing their culture.
Japanese play Go, and if you're looking at numbers there are far more Chinese people than there are Japanese.
For Japanese, the chess version of their history is 将棋（http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi）
And their population of playing Shogi and Go are analysis below in Japanese language (it is said the population of Shogi VS GO is 14M VS 3~4M) . http://www11.ocn.ne.jp/~igo-298/COMPARISON-SYOUGI.htm
When we talk about GO, maybe we know GO is coming from China in Tang Dynasty to Japan, so actually the GO come from China and nowadays Chinaare fighting the world GO champion with Korea but not Japan. So we do not need to mention Go here (In fact, the population of GO player in China （1-5M） are same or even less than Japan for years since Go in Japan are kept well).
Japanese most popular chess is Shogi which is similar to chess and are kept and enhanced well so Japanese play less chess of International Version.
For Chinese as I mentioned, the history are commanded forgetten for long and we learn the culture from Russion and American for long and even now many chinese prefer those culture to our own. So the imported chess of international version are popular in China than chess in Japan.
And what is more, in fact in China, the population of all kinds of chess (XiangQI ShoGI or Chess) are far less than Mahjone （it used to be ILLEGEL but recovered quite soon because it is a game of money）(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%BA%BB%E5%B0%86) and some poke games.
I do realize that the Japanese culture has shogi, but after watching the movie "Mishima", I came to realize that there's a parallel between the samurai culture and the sacrificial gambit plays found in chess.