Russia and China are authoritarian societies where dissent is not acceptable. So yeah, no shit protests, activism and social movements are less of a big deal there, when either the government will beat/imprison/kill/disappear you for taking part in them, or bully-boys will be allowed by the government to beat/kill you. PETA aren’t particularly huge anywhere, and are very much US-centric. Greenpeace is pretty popular all over the place, including South America. Friends of the Earth I have no idea, I always think of it as a UK charity.
In less-developed countries it’s certainly true that protest tends to be more about “How about don’t commit genocide, eh, government?” or “Please stop the Islamist rebels from kidnapping our kids” or “Can we have democracy back please”, but I don’t think that means people don’t support other ideas, or wouldn’t. It seems like most of the world, once you get actual peace and democracy or something like it, suddenly those ideas start becoming important, sometimes shockingly fast too. I think there’s this paternalistic and rather 1900s idea of non-Western nations that everyone there is “close to the earth” and yet doesn’t care about conservation or climate change or the like.
Which is just demonstrably not true. It’s a priority queue though. It’s hard to care about that stuff when wars are breaking out, or democracy isn’t present, or protests end in massacres.
In most of South America, where things are calmer, these sort of issues are rapidly rising in importance and support (outside of Brazil, which is some kind of aberration). Similarly in the calmer bits of Africa. Asia I know less about, particularly because it’s a hodge-podge of authoritarian regimes, with even the tourist-friendly bits often being borderline dictatorships or at least non-democratic. India is a complicated one - I think a lot of the “protest energy” (which is a limited resource, I swear) is directed towards dealing with religious conflicts and brutal rapes/murders which the authorities are lackadaisical about dealing with.
I feel like Japan is kind of more of an aberration that you think it is here. I can’t think of an equally-free Western-style Democracy full of well-paid, well-educated people where protests, activism, and generally making the world a better place are more frowned upon, and I don’t think it’s going to last more than a couple of generations more, not any more than the British “stiff upper lip” and so on did.
(Further on animal rights hypocrisy, I think if, in the West, pigs were about twice as obviously smart, were an endangered species, lived free in the wild, and were slaughtered in really spectacularly brutal ways, then we’d have a better comparison with Japan and dolphins/whales. Also again if you eat pigs and try to say “but you eat pigs too!” in response to “Yo, you have people literally mass-slaughtering dolphins with machetes, axes, spears and so on… that’s kind of fucked-up…” you’re really concern-trolling.)
TLDR - There’s only so much time/energy people have for protest, and they’ll use it on what is most immediate and horrifying to them. In a lot of countries that’s going to mean governments being corrupt or evil, or violent crime of types the West has barely seen since the 1700s, or lack of democracy or the like (or sadly “people from that bad religion we don’t like still have rights!!! Please fix!!!” - the West is a few terrorist bombings off that though). That doesn’t mean people don’t care about other issues, as becomes obvious when things improve, and suddenly these issues appear almost out of nowhere with a lot of support. Authoritarian regimes typically don’t allow protest, and take the same dim view of animal rights protestors as human rights ones, because any boat-rocking is unacceptable.
PS - The right in the West understand this, note. One of the reasons they want to do stuff like pointlessly roll back LGBT and/or abortion rights, even though it make zero difference to their lives and doesn’t even poll that well with their own base in many cases, is that it uses up “protest energy”, often vast amounts of it. If people aren’t protesting about LGBT/abortion stuff, they’re going to start looking more at other societal inequalities, ones which might be more problematic for those governments to have to deal with, like climate change, wealth inequality, the military-industrial complex and so on.
