Analysis Of Japanese Business Communication Etiquette

In the 21st century, globalization has required the formation of cross-cultural communication, in which there are the numerous opportunities for humanity to exchange and communicate with people from other cultures in the world. Intercultural communication is the era trend and plays a crucial role in many aspects of life, especially in business communication. However, to avoid culture shock, people need to comprehend inhabitants’ the basic communication habits in an unfamiliar environment.

This paper will only focus on analyzing several scenarios extracted from two videos about Japanese business communication etiquette, and perhaps it can point out some notable differences, which helps foreigners such as Americans achieve high communication

Mathur (2010) pointed out in his book "Global Business Strategies: Text and Cases" that it is not often used for Japanese to gesticulate while they say, and large hand gestures will be seen as a distraction and loss of focus on the dialogue. Meanwhile, the American man uses his hands a lot. According to Annie Murphy Paul (2013), the movements people make with their hands when they talk would set up a kind of the second language, adding information that's absent from our words. Gesture expose what we know and display what people do not know. However, to compensate for not using hand gestures, Japanese often smile during the conversation, according to the rest video. In her book" Japanese and American Cross- Cultural Business Negotiations" Akihisa Kumayama wrote that one of the values of the Japanese Culture is putting people at ease. This explains why Japanese regularly smile during the conversation. They laugh with many implications. During the conversation, a smile is due to gratification with the result of the discussion, shame or sometimes something

When the problem cannot be solved immediately, American man wants people to raise their voice; however, Japanese just keeps silence. In this case, for American, spoken words play a vital role in communication because they would reflect someone's inner thoughts. Conversely, they suppose that silence conveys a range of negative experiences such as embarrassment, disapproval, shyness, an unwillingness to communicate (Howard. G, Nikolas. C & John. W, 1992). Cultural anthropologist Edward Hall emphasized in his work “Beyond Culture” that Japan is considered as a high context culture, which likes to utilize high- context messages in which a large portion of the significance is either inferred by the physical setting or supposed to be a part of one of the cultural patterns such as values, norms, beliefs, and social practices; the meaning is coded and be obvious next to nothing in some parts of the messages. When communicating with each other, it is unessential to verbalize everything clearly; because thanks to a shared background Japanese can understand already what the speaker is expressing. Sentiments can be conveyed by few words, or through subtle nonverbal signals. There is a Japanese saying, "Hear one, understand ten." Silence can also have great meaning. In addition, Japanese usually keep silence because of avoiding conflict and remaining