Does Japanese women's vocal pitch deserve the front-page status of the New York Times, again?

This question arose when I saw Hiroko Tabuchi's report from Sendai, "Japan's Top Voice: High, Polite and on the Phone" (N.Y. Times, Dec. 15, 2013).

The subject instantly reminded me of one of the dispatches from Japan in the mid-1990s by Nicholas Kristof, then N.Y. Times' Tokyo bureau chief.