They say you can learn a lot about a culture by its unusual vocabulary. There are many words in Japanese that are difficult to express in English - including most 挨拶, which itself is hard to express in English. Of course, English has common words to use as greetings too, but most English speakers don't feel any pressure to use the same ones other people use. In other words, they're not really standardized like Japanese 挨拶. Therefore, words like ご苦労様 or お願いします don't have single, direct translations. In fact, one fun part of speaking English is finding your own way to say those things.
If I drew some kind of general conclusion from this, I'd say that Japanese society is more formal than most English-speaking societies.
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