To me, one particular reason that text boards flourished in the east yet not the west - particularly Japan - is that a large portion of internet access in these societies is entirely on mobile devices, rather than people sitting on PC's as you have in North America and Europe. That is not to say that there is no mobile use in western societies, but rather due to the highly urbanized and dense populations in a country like Japan, such forms of quick, easy, and immediate forms of communication will flourish more.

Where as, in the west, forums have and still currently are primary form of anonymous posting online to people across a global scale. This assumes that you exclude popular social networks like Twitter or Facebook where most peoples "friends" are known in real life. To me, social networks have no direct similarities to "anonymous" internet posting, such as what you get on Newsgroups, text boards, image boards, forums or even IRC, at least when comparing majority populations.

I think the most distinct difference is that most of the English speaking internet "culture" has moved onto more Web 2.0 style communication, with heavy emphasis on individuality and personality. Where as in Japan and Corea, they still use text based and similar minimalist styles of communication for whatever reasons.

As for a type of text board renaissance amongst western internet users, I highly doubt it. The main reason being, the internet is simply becoming more and more mainstream amongst every day people and is essentially a fundamental part of the Earths functionality at this point. People want accessibility and function. Even image boards are becoming a fringe interest, as shown by moots questionable attempt to turn 4chan into a Web 2.0 style network with Canvas (I can't speak for how it's doing though). The majority of memes and other peculiarities that spawned from image boards have been (subjectively) hi-jacked by the internet as a whole so I don't even believe there is a "need" for image boards. Those who post at them are part of either these following groups: 1) those who've been "part" of image boards for a while; 2) those who simply find them interesting and find them a useful way of communication, 3) pretentious snobs who think BBS boards are the only "real" form of communication, like the people that still haven't grown out of Newsgroups.