Conversations with The Translator: Japanese Business Culture

Kate: Japan is often described as a high context culture and the United States as a low context culture. In low context cultures, people—Americans—explain themselves more. Since American culture is comprised of many immigrants who don't share a background of cultural references, things have to be spelled out. In high context cultures, people—Japanese—explain themselves less. There's more reliance on what's going on between-the-lines.

A few years ago, while preparing for an Interpersonal Communications course, I read The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. She argues that many problems in business arise when two different high context cultures come together—since they don't share the same core references, the implied communication goes awry.

Does the Japanese business world rely on "I can take for granted that you understand what I'm talking about?" Does it work? Does nobody worry that if the implication is misunderstood, a law suit could be right around the corner?

Eugene: It's true that Japan is a high-context culture, meaning that everybody is assumed to share the same operating system, and if you don't then you pretend you do. Rather than "high" and "low," call it "go along to get along" versus "I'm from Missouri."

The value of "go along to get along" is that everybody is loath to make waves. Making waves only proves you weren't getting along. The steep downside comes when your superior assumes X has been communicated and you have no idea what X is.

Even worse, your superior may simply be trying to communicate what his superior assumes he understood and is kicking the can down the road. According to novelist Kaoru Takamura (she began her career at a foreign trading company):

In an organization where the authority-responsibility structure is unclear, employees are unable to make their own decisions and must constantly refer to their superiors. But because these superiors are also unclear about their own authority, they can't make responsible decisions. Problems just get shuffled around and everyone ends up working longer hours.

It comes down to the ratio of actual work to CYA. The consensus-seeking, conflict-avoiding style of Japanese business becomes a way of avoiding blame. If you've got to cover your superior's ass, you're going to make doubly sure your own ass is covered too.

The hallowed business practices of ringi (the bottom-up circulation of new proposals) and nemawashi (the politicking that accompanies it) do produce a sense of collective responsibility and wa (harmony).

But they also obviate personal responsibility (the buck stops nowhere) and chew up tons of time. Noah Smith states it bluntly: white-collar productivity is horrendous in Japan. There is a price for everything, and the one for "getting along" can be steep. In this video, Shogo looks at history, culture, and social psychology to explain how things got to be this way in Japan. This video by Nobita covers similar ground from the perspective of the "Fundamental Japanese Mindset."

Kate: Meyer makes the point that heads of business are often the most skilled in either low context or high context (a successful American businessman is very good at direct communication; a successful Japanese businessman is very good at implied communication). She also points out that business people who work internationally become adept at switching between contexts.

In the manga and light novels I read, working abroad is a big deal—very sophisticated and outside-the-box and sexy. How common is working abroad for Japanese workers?

Eugene: Working abroad is a big deal, for much the same reasons that studying abroad is a big deal, and thus usually avoided, unless it can be squeezed in without disrupting the normal school year. Except for students who intend to step outside the Japanese education system, once you get off the "escalator," you may never get back on.

This is why employees who are transferred even within Japan will often leave their families behind. A common plot device to get a high school student living on his own is to send his parents somewhere else because of work.

Likewise, working abroad can throw a wrench into an employee's climb up the organizational ladder. While it can present opportunities for an enterprising employee who designs his career advancement around the acquisition of certain skills, the possibility is more often than not looked upon with dread.

In Hanasaki Mai Speaks Out, a mystery series about a pair of bank examiners, the punishment for playing fast and loose with the bank's finances (short of committing an actual felony) is always a transfer to a branch office out in the boonies.

Kate: Ah--like how badly behaved police officers always get transferred to Staten Island! 

The point about harmony is interesting. Some textbooks label cultures low context versus high context and some label them individualistic versus collectivist. According to the textbooks, in collectivist cultures, "we" (collective harmony) is given precedence. It is more acceptable to criticize outsiders than insiders. In individualistic cultures, "I" is given precedence and criticism of insiders is more acceptable.

Erin Meyer of The Culture Map points out that high/low/individualistic/collectivist is relatively relative (although Japan is the most extreme of the high context cultures). She quotes from a German businessman: "We Germans always complain that the British are disorganized, chaotic, and always late—exactly the complaint the British in your example lodged against the French."

Which reminded me of a very funny movie I saw from Scotland in which the London police officer is portrayed as a big, loud, practically Texan-like guy, kind of the way Americans are sometimes portrayed in British shows (like Keen Eddie, although there, Keen Eddie's brashness is admired as impressively efficient if lacking in tact).

Is there another Asian group that the Japanese present as being noisy, brash outliers?

Eugene: Well, there's Osaka, which Nobita says is probably the best fit for the extraverted foreigner.

P.J. O'Rourke described South Koreans as the Irish of Asia. The history between Korea and Japan shares certain resemblances with that between Ireland and Great Britain. Compared to pretty much everybody else, Japanese are the reserved and well-mannered Brits of Asia (which, like Great Britain, didn't stop Japan from trying to colonize the whole region in ill-mannered ways). Here's Nobita again.

Japanese immigrated to the Americas in significant number at the turn of the last century. Japanese Brazilians now constitute the largest Japanese population outside Japan. In the 1990s, the Japanese government launched a "reverse migration" program that gave preference to Japanese descendants from South America, especially Brazil.

The program met with mixed success. With a population of over 200,000, Brazilians of Japanese descent today constitute the fifth-largest ethnic group in Japan.

But according to Takeyuki Tsuda, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University, "Japanese Brazilians ended up being much more culturally Brazilian, leading to complaints that they can't speak Japanese, are too loud in apartments and in public, and don't follow community rules."

In 2009, the Japanese government introduced a repatriation program to incentivize unassimilated immigrants from South America to return home, and in 2018 revised the immigration law to limit residency claims.

Kate: In a later post, we will tackle Japanese immigration laws. When Americans complain about immigration laws, on either side of the issue, it must provoke a lot of head-scratching among, oh, the rest of the world. 

Back to The Culture Map, one chapter addresses trust and how Americans split work trust from affective trust; in some cultures, however, the two things are combined: I go out to dinner with you, share friendly, personal moments; voila, we have established a strong, working relationship.

The author quotes from a boss who was upset when he and his American partner appeared to form a friendly, personal relationship over get-togethers, yet the American partner still wanted to go over their contract with a fine-tooth comb.

This is when my American culture sense kicked in big-time. My reaction was, Oh, come on. People can have all kinds of warm & fuzzy feelings—that does not make them trustworthy in the business sense (the old adage about never hiring friends comes to mind).

Meyer points out that a nation of pioneers has learned to split "I am friendly with my neighbors" from "I still own a shotgun," although her explanation is more diplomatic: America is a "peach" culture. We are warm and friendly to outsiders; however, once outsiders hit the hard pit at our core, we are impenetrable to all but a privileged few.

I had to wonder: Do Japanese business agreements ever suffer from too much trust based on "Hey, we're buddies!"? Or does hard-headedness take over in the long run?

Eugene: Perhaps nothing exemplifies this issue more than the "It's me, it's me" scam (Ore Ore Sagi) that plays on equal parts blind trust, family ties, and group image. The scam begins with a cold call, often to an elderly person, claiming that a child or grandchild is in trouble and needs money wired to them immediately. The reasons can range from settling hospital bills to paying off debt collectors to buying somebody's silence.

At the business level, the "OB" (old boy) system is alive and well (in Japan it's referred to with those initials). Injecting a large dollop of xenophobia on top of that can result in a "you and me against the world" mentality.

Toss in the context of the zaibatsu (large family-controlled vertical monopolies) and keiretsu (a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings), and you end up with the Olympus scandal.

At Olympus, the "peach pit" was the foreign CEO. The immediate response of the board was to fire him, but the scandal had already come to light.

A more recent example is Carlos Ghosn of Nissan. He got caught up in a boardroom coup, was accused of financial improprieties, and jumped bail. He would have been better off in the long run working within the system, but I understand how he could simply not comprehend the Kafkaesque situation he found himself in. "I will not stand for this!" he declared. Well, he should have stood for it, but he had no idea how to play that game.

Or consider the financial meltdowns in the U.S. and Japan, about a decade apart. They had the same approximate cause:

The cozy relationship of corporations to banks and the implicit guarantee of a taxpayer bailout of bank deposits created a significant moral hazard problem, leading to an atmosphere of crony capitalism and reduced lending standards.

But as bad as the U.S. banking crisis was, the boom was lowered. In Japan, with all those intertwined relationships, nobody wanted to be the bad guy. Not really alive, not really dead, "zombie banks" staggered along corrupting everything they touched. The result was Japan's lost decade.

Perhaps Ronald Reagan put it best: "Trust, but verify" (a Russian proverb he learned for his dealings with Gorbachev). Without this attitude, a "diverse" society will balkanize into groups with internal trust because of common family, ethnic, and/or religious ties, but no external trust.

One way to describe the "rule of law": we don't trust each other but we both trust the law in its interpretation and execution.