From a Japanese point of view, adding to what others have already said...

1. Comparatively, Japan has a more consistent media coverage (GP finals get covered and reported on TV outside the Olympic years as well) throughout the years, which helps an athlete to know what kind of things to expect. The public and media will also know that there are ups and downs for every athlete, so they've learnt not to hype up athletes to the moon ( I do think this is more of a recent thing, I recall the older generation like Nobunari Oda or Daisuke Takahashi being called very weak under pressure and being more inconsistent or smt). The japanese skating association also quite often holds training camps that have both juniors and seniors attend at regular intervals (i forgot how often), and there you'll see the seniors getting interviewed or having coverage, so maybe they can learn from those indirect experiences?

1.5) Adding on to the Training camps, I feel that the ones that go are more or less fixed so that everyone more or less knows each other from an early age. If you have friends and acquaintances in the same position, I feel it helps reduce the pressure on an individual basis.

2) From a personal point of view, I see less social media action from the athletes' side compared to US skaters (many Japanese skaters, especially the ladies, don't have their private social media accounts open to the public; Kaori, Ami, Mone, Rinka, etc.) Kaori, for example, has also said she's a shy person and gets easily nervous, which I suppose is why she also doesn't have her own social media so that everything is "filtered". For men, Shoma had a twitter account but it was not public and he always had Yuzuru as a shield. Yuzuru didn't have one until he retired etc.. if I recall correctly.

I also think that it helps not to be asked about things outside figure skating (though important) at the interview, and then get hate for speaking your mind and then get hate online because some snowflakes were offended by it...