Intercultual Communication and Japanese Workers

Japanese workers need to become more sensitive and adaptive to cultural differences in order to improve their international communication abilities. While it is taken for granted that mutual understanding of different cultures is important for global business, only a few people realize what it implies in international communication. Most Japanese workers only superficially understand about cultural difference by associating it with obvious examples, such as difference in life styles, foods or religious customs in foreign countries.

Several years ago, there was an opportunity to see a serious communication problem at an international meeting in Japan. A Japanese finance manager, who is inexperienced in international business, was giving a presentation on his business proposal to an American executive in the conference. Although it started smoothly, the manager felt pressurized, denied, and he finally withdrew his business proposal in the midst of presentation after the executive briefly asked a question about financial data in the slide. Unfortunately, this incident provided the executive from the U.S. headquarters with a sense of distrust against the entire finance group of the Japan subsidiary. Actually, there were no inaccurate figures in the presentation material because the manager had spent a lot of time to refine his proposal before the meeting. He had also written the whole script in English, and conducted a dry-run before the real presentation to be well-prepared. However, he did not recognize the cultural barrier as a major risk at international communication, and he was not well-prepared for adjusting himself to the different communication style that he would face at the conference.

In this essay, I am going to analyse the communication problem occurred in my workplace by applying established intercultural communication theories.

High context and low context cultures

As Rogers et al. (2002, p.16) described that Edward T. Hall's concept "brought interdisciplinary perspective to the issue of Japanese interactions with non-Japanese", one of the reasons why the Japanese finance manager was daunted by being asked a question at the meeting can be explained by Hall's context model (1976). Hall suggested that cultures could be categorized according to their communication styles by referring to the degree of non-verbal context used in communication.

From his findings, the United States belongs to the low context culture, in which words convey explicitly most of the meaning, non-verbal signals have less impact, and ultimately "everything must be spelled out" (Ito, 2005, p.457) for effective and efficient communication. People in low context culture do not tend to hesitate to ask questions when they need more information (Dwyer, 2009), and expect logical, lean and straightforward answers to better understand subjects (Sapienza, 2008).

In contrast, Japan culture is classified to high context culture, in which a large part of the message is influenced by the background and "basic value of the communicator (Dwyer, 2009, p.38)". People in high context culture tend to use implicit, imperfect, and ambiguous messages whose meanings can be found in a non-verbal manner, such as facial expression, length and timing of silence, or tone of voices. Therefore, there are a lot of "read-between-the-lines" situations in this type of culture (Sapienza, 2008). Ito (2005) deduced that the origin of Japan's high context culture derived from its demographic homogeneity ascribable to the long history as a small island nation. Japanese workers rarely ask questions at business conferences in a direct way because those questions may sound too aggressive to other Japanese participants. Asking a direct question is often interpreted as a signal that the questioner is emotionally opposed to the matter.

Japanese anthropologist Masao Kunihiro (as cited in Ito, 2005, p.457) summarized the difference of communication styles between the United States and Japan as follows: "English is intended strictly for communication. Japanese is primarily interested in feeling out the other person's mood". With regard to the communication problem observed in my work place, it is contemplated that the American executive simply sought to better understand the presented business proposal by asking a direct question in his low context communication style. However, on the other hand, the Japanese unnecessarily tried to find the hidden messages which he believed must be implied by the direct question, and incorrectly perceived that the American executive became frustrated and emotionally opposed to the business proposal.

Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory

Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory (as cited in Dwyer, 2009) further explains the intercultural communication problem between the Japanese manager and the American executive. According to this theory, there are four main dimensions in which cultures differ in their values, namely the Power Distance, Individualism, Masculinity and Uncertainty Avoidance.

Power Distance is described as "the extent to which less powerful members of a society accept inequality in power and status as normal (Dwyer 2009, p. 46)". The United States' Power Distance was scored 40, which is lower than the one of Japan' 54 (Itim International, 2012). American workers call their bosses by their first names and talk to each other quite friendly. They actively discuss business matter at a meeting because they believe it is a value creating