Soprano Mitsuko Shirai, as quoted by Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer in his book of conversations with Hosokawa Toshio, Toshio Hosokawa: Stille und Klang, Schatten und Licht:

Wenn ich auf Japanish "ich" singe, ist das einen Meter von mir weg, aber wenn ich in einem deutschen Lied, einem Schubert-Lied "ich" singe, dann ist das in meinem Herzen.

The context is Sparrer and Hosokawa having the usual discussion of communitarianism vs individualism (sparked by Hosokawa remarking that his grandmother had very little "Ich"), so I assume that we are to take Shirai's remarks as emblematic of contrasting cultural attitudes to the self. But I couldn't help thinking that the paucity of Japanese Lieder-qua-Lieder (Romantic poetry + piano) on a Schubertian level may also be at work here.

Bonus Shirai, from Benjamin Ivry's "Mitsuko Shirai and the Art of German Lieder":

The Japanese music critics were about to give us a prize for one of our CDs, but none of them knew enough German to say whether my pronunciation of the language was truly idiomatic. So they consulted a German colleague in Tokyo, and he assured them that my German was fine. So we got the prize, after all.