Oh, oh, I can answer the second one, and it's a fun exercise in socio-linguistics: look at what lines the titles choose to draw their distinctions on, and that's what the society considers important.
America is aggressively egalitarian and doesn't have much in the way of different forms of address except for the standard Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms. But look at that short list and what does that tell you about English speaking cultures, historically? It says that men and women need to be distinguished between, and women are divided along married/unmarried/divorced-or-a-dyke!feminist lines. It draws gender distinctions, and then subdivides women from there.
I'm an American translator living in Japan right now, grown rather familiar with the casual system of honorifics as they're used on this side of the pond. They're nearly ubiquitous here and nearly the only time you'll see a lack of honorifics is between close friends. Even families in the privacy of their own homes will use honorifics when talking to each other.
So why, in the states, don't we call our brothers Mr. whatever? Well because English labels denote gender, which doesn't really need to be reinforced, but mainly because Mr/etc is inherently formal (and therefore unsuitable for talking with intimates) while a number of Japanese "honorifics" are the opposite -- instead of creating a linguistic sense of distance, they imply closeness. (-chan being the standard example)
Mostly what the Japanese system does is show the hierarchy of the speakers, who's the boss and who's the underling. Hierarchy can be determined by any number of things, and while men are given privileged status culturally, gender is not as important linguistically (when talking about someone else; Japanese and its gendered first-person pronouns would imply that your own gender identity is very important) as acknowledging that this person outranks you, WAY outranks you, is on par with you, or underranks you. In a similar vein, they have a set of pronouns for describing an absent third-party that goes like "that person I know really well"/"that person you know really well"/"that person I don't know and I wouldn't imply that you do either, because GOD, what an asshat, eh?"
I love Japanese so much.
-lacking an insanejournal account, but replicant_rasa on LJ