Japanese business etiquette Archives

Japanese Business Mysteries Explained – Falling Asleep in Meetings

We’ve revamped our Rudlin Consulting YouTube channel, and posted our latest Japanese Business Mysteries Explained in 5 minutes video screencast – this edition is on falling asleep in meetings.

Why do Japanese people fall asleep in meetings? Is it you? Is it OK to do it in Japan? What can you do about it?

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Historical roots of cultural differences in pandemic prevention

My husband is currently tanshin funin, (a Japanese term meaning living alone away from family for work reasons) working in a boarding school just too far away to commute home every day. His apartment is in a building which used to be a sanatorium, for isolating people with tuberculosis, before WWII. Before a pharmaceutical cure was discovered, the thinking was that fresh air and sleeping outdoors was the way to cure tuberculosis. Unfortunately, this means there are huge, drafty windows and doors in the apartment, so it is freezing cold, even though there is central heating.

Although fresh air and sleeping outside does not actually cure tuberculosis, it transpires that having well ventilated rooms was a very effective way of preventing other people from catching tuberculosis. Similarly, sleeping outside was not a cure, but staying horizontal helped relieve the symptoms.

Europe’s public plagues, cholera and typhoid

This story of how tuberculosis was treated in Europe and now the spread of coronavirus around the world highlights how cultural differences might be rooted in each country’s history of disease. It also means there are still cultural barriers to selling healthcare products worldwide.

Medieval bubonic plagues in Europe were spread by fleas* and were controlled by quarantining households, cities and even regions. The cholera and typhoid epidemics in the 19^th century were mainly caused by contaminated food and water, and controlled in industrialising northern European countries by improved public hygiene and sanitation for food and water supplies, and cured by the invention of antibiotics.

Japan’s household smallpox

Japan suffered more from smallpox epidemics – since at least the 8^th century. These mostly affected children. Smallpox is transmitted by prolonged physical proximity, particularly skin to skin contact. So smallpox epidemics in Japan were mostly managed at the family or village level.

I wonder whether this history explains why Japanese people to this day do not shake hands or hug and kiss as much as the Europeans do. It could also explain why Japanese people are still in the habit of carrying a handkerchief around for drying their own hands, rather than blowing their noses into it, as Europeans do.

In the UK, to prevent being infected by the coronavirus, we have been told to wash our hands with soap, or use hand sanitizers if water and soap are not available, and to blow our noses, sneeze or cough into paper tissues and then dispose of them immediately. We’ve also been told to avoid handshaking, which we do less than Germans do anyway, and we never kissed and hugged as much as the Italians do.

As a consequence of government advice, British shops have run out of hand sanitizers, but apparently the incidence of other flu varieties (which can kill 1000s a year in the UK) has dropped dramatically. Maybe we British had become too reliant on state healthcare and intervention and are now learning we have to take the initiative ourselves and go back to old methods – just as my husband did. He has bought an old-fashioned hot water bottle to keep himself warm. Old familiar ways provide comfort in times of crisis.

*Although there has been some interesting research suggesting the Black Death may not have been bubonic but an Ebola type virus

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 8th April 2020

No Japanese visitors please, we’re busy, say Estonian start ups

Estonian e-residency was something I considered for my business as a possible Brexit contingency plan. It wouldn’t have helped me keep my EU citizenship, but I could at least run the European side of the business from Estonia, and have a euro bank account for invoicing in euros. In the end I decided to ask my German partner to take over the euro business, but I was very tempted, having had an enjoyable business trip there a couple of years’ ago, combined with a holiday.

I wrote a couple of articles about Estonia and e-residency for a Japanese magazine after that, and it would seem the word has got out to Japanese businesses about Estonia’s digital economy as according to Kota Alex Saito, co- founder of SetGo, an e-residency business in Estonia, he is constantly having to field enquiries from Japanese businesses wanting to visit start ups there.

The dreaded hyoukei houmon

The Estonia Briefing Centre says that 146 groups of 1135 Japanese people visited Estonia in 2018, the second biggest grouping after Germany. However, as Saito points out, very few of them actually then start businesses or invest in Estonia or bring Estonian business to Japan. It is more what the Japanese call 表敬訪問 (hyoukei houmon – usually translated as “courtesy call”).

For Estonian start ups, it is more of a discourtesy to give up your time to show round groups of visitors, and get nothing in return except maybe some rice crackers. As Saito says, they are expecting visits to lead to some sort of business proposition, so “let’s keep in touch” is really not a good enough result. Hyoukei houmon were the bane of my life when I worked for Mitsubishi Corporation in London too – trying to persuade busy European executives that meeting Japanese “missions” would not be a waste of their time.

A difference in scale and mindset

For the Japanese visitors, the main point seems to be simply to see the petrie dish of a digital economy. But as Saito says, Estonia only has a population of 1.3 million, so trying to scale that up by 100 times to a Japanese scale is not a simple process. Furthermore, Estonia has a highly transparent system of data on companies, government and people, so e-government is less feared. There is a big difference in mindset that Japan could learn from, but may find hard to imitate.

Saito gives advice which I often give in my seminars to Japanese and Europeans working together – make the purpose of your meeting clear, do your research beforehand, make sure there are action points at the end that you follow up on.

April – a time for cleaning and renewal in Japan and Europe

Japanese people living in northern Europe tell me they miss the distinctive four seasons of Japan. At first this seems a strange thing to say to most Europeans, as we believe we have four distinct seasons too. But it is true that changes in the season are far less predictable than in Japan, and from autumn through to spring there can be a succession of indistinguishable grey, wet, cold days.

Spring has come earlier than normal this year thanks to an unusually warm winter. The daffodils and crocuses are already beginning to bloom in the parks where I walk my dog and this weekend my husband and I remarked how busy and energised the town seemed. Although the end of season sales are still dragging on, the new spring stock is in, with fresh, lighter colours in the window. The bright sunshine pushed me outdoors to clean the outside of our windows of the winter grime and my husband has nearly finished repainting the kitchen.

Spring cleaning vs the Big Clean

We call this “spring cleaning” in the UK – similar to the Osoji (Big Cleaning) that happens in Japan for the New Year. We don’t do much cleaning around New Year partly because the days are so short – getting dark by 4pm with the sun rising as late as 8am at the end of December. Even in the daylight hours it is too gloomy to see the dirt.

Spring is also a time of rebirth and renewal in the Christian calendar. From February 10^th to March 24^th this year is a period called Lent, when you are meant to give up vices such as drinking alcohol or smoking or eating favourite foods such as chocolate. This is a way of remembering the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the desert and is supposed to be a spiritual preparation for Easter (the weekend of 26^th and 27^th March this year), which commemorates the death and resurrection of Jesus. These dates change from year to year – Easter and Lent in 2017 will be three weeks later than 2016.

Pre-Christian origins of Easter

Actually the word “Easter” has pre-Christian origins – deriving from an old Germanic word for dawn. According to the 8^th century historian, Bede, there was a northern European pagan goddess of dawn, Eostre, whose symbol was a hare or rabbit – which is thought to be why so many Easter decorations feature rabbits. Another symbol of Easter, the egg, either made from chocolate or painted hen’s eggs, is also pre-Christian, when people gave each other eggs as gifts around the time of the spring equinox.

A time for cleansing and renewal in Japan and Europe

So, while the financial year of April 1^st to March 31^st is not as universal in Europe as it is in Japan, and our academic year actually starts in September/October, March and April are still a good time to renew and refresh the company. The rhythms of a cleansing and preparation period in February and March, followed by a new lease of life in April have deep roots in the European psyche.

This article was originally published in the Teikoku Databank News in March 2016 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

How to negotiate with the Japanese – don’t

A friend from business school days phoned me last week to ask for my advice on negotiating with Japanese business people. He was about to fly out to Japan to meet a potential joint venture partner. “I suspect my usual negotiating style might cause offence”, he said. “And apparently I may already have committed a faux pas, because when we met with them in the UK, I tossed my business cards around the table”.

After explaining how to exchange business cards with slightly more finesse, I asked him for full details of the company and people he was going to meet. One lesson we learned during our negotiation course at business school, which is applicable whatever the culture you are dealing with, was “prepare, prepare, prepare”. This means not only knowing as much as you can about the people and company you are meeting, but also being an expert in every single detail of your company and its products or services.

I warned him that other approaches we learnt at business school may not work so well if his counterparts are traditional Japanese business people rather than MBA wielding ‘young guns’. Traditional Japanese business people want to be reassured that you are someone they can trust in the long term. If they spot that you are using tricks and tactics in your negotiation, they may worry that you are insincere and that in the future, if something goes wrong in the deal, you will be adversarial rather than cooperative. For example, it is better to open with a reasonable offer price, rather than a deliberately outrageous position from which you expect to be beaten down by half.

Other negotiating tactics, such as having a BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) may be useful, and indeed you may be asked who else you are talking with or supplying to. Too much focus on a written negotiated agreement may be a mistake however, as it will not be the endpoint with a Japanese partner, rather the start of a relationship, subject to change and unofficial amendments in the future. Also, your Japanese counterparts may need to have further internal discussions, so do not expect to come out of a meeting with the final deal.

The amount of time this takes, and the seemingly unending questions may result in the Western side beginning to wonder if they are trusted, and if the deal will ever happen. Westerners prefer to make step by step concessions, expecting give and take, particularly when it comes to divulging sensitive information. Japanese negotiators want to know and even see everything before they make any commitments. This is due to risk aversion – they know that none of the executives on their side will want to agree to anything unless every single possible risk and issue has been uncovered and dealt with. But of course this can be a deal breaker for the Western side, who do not want to show all their intellectual property or ‘dirty laundry’ until they can be reasonably sure of good faith on the other side, that the deal will go ahead.

Indeed much of the concrete detail may be settled outside the negotiating room. When I was working in building material sales in Japan, our Zimbabwean suppliers used to visit once a year to negotiate prices and shipping schedules. The first time I participated in the negotiation meeting I was surprised to find that we spent the first day exchanging data and views on industry trends. During a coffee break I asked one of the Zimbabweans when we would get down to the ‘real’ negotiation and talk about prices.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “tonight your boss and my boss will go out for a Korean barbecue and some beers, and they’ll settle the prices then. It happens every year.” Sure enough, the next day, as if by magic, a piece of paper with agreed prices appeared.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

Namae – or name?

As I mentioned in a previous article, the question of how to address Japanese colleagues or customers is almost always raised in our seminars. I explain that it is indeed a complex issue, but surname-san is the default option. It’s polite enough, particularly if you are not Japanese anyway. However, a Japanese junior often addresses a Japanese senior by their job title – kacho (section chief, the first real manager position in a Japanese company) or bucho (general manager) for example and would address a customer with surname-sama or with their job title.

The new egalitarianism

But this is changing in Japan too. When Kozo Takahashi took over as President of Sharp, he insisted, as part of a major culture change – that from now on, all seniors would be addressed as surname-san, rather than by job title plus dono. As I mentioned when I blogged on this, bucho-dono is rather like calling someone Mr General Manager.

Diamond Online reckons this egalitarian trend started as far back as the late 1980s. New companies that were booming then like Recruit had a culture where all were called surname-san. Still, the older more traditional companies to this day keep to the job title system. I frequently ask my Japanese contacts at our clients what their company culture is like, and some say it even depends which department you are in – whether they stick to the tradition or have moved to surname-san. Diamond Online describes how in one financial services company there are 6 layers of titles from branch manager down, and one young staff member was even scolded for calling a colleague deputy chosayaku when he was a full chosayaku. There is no one translation of chosayaku by the way – I have found ‘assistant to section manager’, ‘assistant manager’ and ‘assistant to director’ in various sources. Google Translate translates it literally as ‘investigation officer’, which yet again proves that Google Translate should not be relied upon. Either way, you can see why you would be quite keen to be called “assistant manager” rather than “deputy assistant manager”.

The disappearing kacho

The term kacho might disappear completely in some companies, Diamond Online asserts in another article. In companies like Sony, which have moved completely away from any kind of seniority based promotion to one based on job roles and competencies, the change has resulted in demotion to “individual contributor” for around half of the 40% of their staff that were previously in management grades. Panasonic is also reviewing its bucho/kacho system and has, in the interests of developing its staff better, decided that managers should have around 7 staff members reporting to them. This is in reaction to having flattened the hierarchy to speed up decision making, only to find that staff development suffered.

My old employer Mitsubishi led the way in the 1980s, by changing the ka (section) and kacho (section chief) system to ‘team’ and ‘team leader’. This was due to the fact that there were too many people in the kacho grade and not enough sections to manage. The resulting dual system – whereby you have a kacho grade but your job role may or may not include managing a team is one that many Japanese companies have since adopted.

Job mobility

Diamond Online reckons whether you stick with the kacho system or get rid of it depends on whether your corporate culture is one where it doesn’t matter if decisions take a long time, so long as no mistakes are made. The kacho system may also have beneficial knowledge sharing and staff development effects. Role and competency based systems are promoted in Japan by foreign consultancies, says Diamond Online, and often adopted by Japanese companies as a way of cutting salaries. It also makes job mobility easier, if you have a better way of measuring your market value.

It would also make international mobility easier (as Hitachi are hoping), if there is a more globally accepted set of job grades and titles. One of my least favourite requests for advice is helping people translate their job titles into Japanese or from Japanese into English. It is a political minefield and can result in yet more meaningless ‘Mr deputy senior assistant director’ type titles, with nobody the wiser as a result. With many caveats therefore, I offer the chart below:

Succeeding in a Japanese Company Telesummit

I’m one of the interviewees at the Japan Intercultural Consulting “Succeeding in a Japanese Company Telesummit” – a series of interviews broadcast over the internet over March 4th-20th.

It’s free to register and listen during that period, and downloads can also be bought as a package later,

More details here.

My topic is “Profitable Relationship Building with External and Internal Japanese Customers” and the other topics are:

Working with Your Japanese Boss
Understanding and Influencing Decision Makers in Your Japanese Company
Becoming Part of the Team in Your Japanese Workplace
Relationship Building with Japanese — in Person and From Afar
Skillfully Interfacing with the Parent Company in Japan
The Influence of Cultural Differences on Business Processes and How to Improve Your Performance
How to Keep Japanese From Falling Asleep in Your Presentation
How to Give and Receive Feedback with Japanese
How to Avoid Meeting Madness in Your Japanese Company
Same Words, Different Meanings — Effective Communication with Japanese
Getting on the Same Page in Your Japanese Company

From boiler suits to business suits, uniforms aren’t about conformity

In the photos of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s recent visit to disaster stricken Minamisanriku, Miyagi Prefecture, where she has her arm around the mayor, Jin Sato, I couldn’t help noting the contrast between her black trouser suit and high heeled boots and the mayor’s overalls, trainers and baseball cap.

Each, in their way, was wearing a uniform. She had to pick something that was formal enough for a prime minister, subdued and respectful, but which would not look ridiculous as she picked her way through the rubble. The mayor is still wearing the kind of manual worker’s boiler suit that was donned by Prime Minister Naoto Kan, government and TEPCO officials and various company presidents in the immediate aftermath of the March 11 earthquake. Kan has since reverted to a business suit, as have most of the company presidents.

The messages they are giving are clear – Kan and the company presidents are signalling that the immediate emergency and relief work which they were rolling their sleeves up to supervise is now over, and they must get back to formulating the longer term policies for recovery. The mayor is signalling that that there is still much immediate recovery work left to do and that, for his town, the threat of further crises has not yet receded.

Japan is famous for having strict uniforms for every occasion. Perhaps you don’t see quite as many white gloved taxi drivers and certainly far fewer office ladies in waistcoats, skirts and ribbon ties than in previous decades, but despite the best efforts of Japan’s teenage students, uniforms are prevalent and mostly worn neatly and with pride – even for personal hobbies such as hiking. The easy explanation is to say this shows how conformist and group oriented Japanese people are. Or in the case of company presidents, one could say that they are trying to show they are not putting themselves above the other employees.

Actually, having worn a traditional sailor uniform to a Japanese school for several years myself, I think that the Japanese attitude to clothes and uniforms is a lot more nuanced than simply being about conformity or egalitarianism. It is as much about the message you are sending to yourself as to others. By putting on overalls, trainers and a baseball cap in the morning, the mayor is readying himself for action. The ritual of dressing puts the person in the right frame of mind for the day ahead.

It’s related to the traditional way to learn in Japan, from the outside in or “minitsukeru” – which literally means “sticking onto the flesh”. By getting the externals right, the internal settings will adjust accordingly, until the action becomes instinctive.

It’s not about conforming, rather it is about accepting that we have many identities, and that sometimes wearing the correct clothes helps us fulfil those identities better or facilitates the switch from one identity to the other. It also signals the seriousness of our intent to others.

This article originally appeared in the May 9th 2011 edition of the Nikkei Weekly.

Earthquake in Japan – what’s the right thing to do?

I’ve been asked many times the past few days whether to approach and what to say to Japanese colleagues in the aftermath of the terrible earthquake and tsunami.

As with anything so intensely personal, one solution will not fit all and cultural generalizations become even more dangerous, but I am pretty confident of a couple of points. I’m basing it on my own gut instinct, born from having lived in Tokyo during the Kobe earthquake when my team and I had friends and family in the Kansai area – and then this was followed by the Aum terrorist attacks in Tokyo itself. For those of you that are wondering, I do not know anyone directly affected by the Tohoku earthquake, although I did live in Sendai for several years as a child. I do wonder what has happened to all the schoolmates I have lost touch with.

The first thing I would say is do not hesitate to approach your Japanese colleagues, either in person or by email. All you need to say is that you hope their family, friends and colleagues are OK. However you have to bear in mind that all might not be OK, so it is best, if you are approaching them face to face, to ask when there are not so many people around. They may only just have managed to pull themselves together and your question might tip them back over the edge again, causing loss of face.

Do not underestimate how emotional and stressful the situation is even for people who are not directly affected. There have been so many comments in the Western media about how resilient, gaman zuyoi and calm Japanese people are, and it is true overall, but this does not mean there is not a lot of hurt inside, and plenty of emotion being expressed openly as well as through quiet anguish. The TV coverage in Japan is horribly distracting and mesmerising and is now available over the internet too, making work very hard to concentrate on.

Telling your colleagues that you are thinking of them will help though, as not only does it remind Japanese friends that people in the rest of the world do care about Japan, and understand how serious the situation is, but it also gives them a chance to talk with you about how they are feeling. I sense that being “foreign” might even help in this respect, as they can say things they might hesitate to say to a fellow Japanese.

Beware of the Western tendency to want to “do” something and over-communicate however. Listening, and quietly donating money or other practical help are more effective. Otherwise it can look like grandstanding on someone else’s tragedy for self publicity, or to make oneself feel better, more than helping the actual victims.

Right now of course what most people in Japan need is food, fuel and communications, and unfortunately that is very hard to provide long distance.

The san-thing

Almost without fail someone will ask me during my training seminars “are we going to deal with the –san thing?” When I get to the point where I deal with Japanese business etiquette in the session, I try to emphasise that it is really not that complicated. Surname plus san will almost always work.

Except that it is of course much more complicated than that. It’s true that most Japanese men feel uncomfortable being called by their first name, and often their first name is rather long and difficult to pronounce for Westerners. But Japanese women, whose names are usually shorter and easier to pronounce, are happier about being on first name terms.

When “surname-san” is not necessary

I also talk about how some Japanese men, particularly those that have lived in the US, might have adopted a nickname, either a shortened version of their own name, such as Masa, or Tets, or they may have taken a Western name that starts with the same letter as their own name, which (causing added hilarity for the Brits), may well be a very American name, such as Hank, or Duke, or Tex.

In this case, it is not necessary to put “–san” on the end. In fact one of our Japanese client contacts specifically asked me to let his European colleagues know that “Keith” rather than “Keith-san” was his preference. If I reverse the situation, I can see how he feels. Some Japanese colleagues did try to call me “Miss Pernille” when I worked in Japan, and I found it irritating. It overemphasised the cultural difference, and the added politeness put too much distance between us. I was trying to blend in with the Japanese corporate environment, and being addressed by rather quaint forms like “Miss Pernille” just made me stick out more.

What’s with “-chan” and “-kun”?

Sometimes Japanese bosses called me “Pernille-chan”, (“chan” being a dimunitive, usually used for little girls), which was just about acceptable when I was in my twenties but I presume that as I have reached “obasan” (auntie) status in terms of years, most Japanese people would not dream of calling me that now. In fact, one Japanese female participant in one of my seminars, expatriated to Belgium from the Japan headquarters of a major Japanese electronics company, told me that “-chan” and “-kun” (dimunitive for boys) have been banned from the Japanese offices, as they are deemed to be “power harassment”.

In contradiction to that, some very senior European executives at a financial institution recently acquired by a Japanese company told me that their Japanese counterparts had advised them to call their Japanese male subordinates “surname-kun”. I felt I couldn’t overrule such advice, but warned them that this would constitute a very strong power statement.

Maybe just ask, or tell

Ultimately it might help if we either ask the other person how they like to be addressed, or volunteer that information about ourselves, right at the beginning of the relationship, or later on when we feel more comfortable with each other. Or if we’re not so comfortable with over-familiarity, as one of my American friends used to say “That’s Mr. Mr. Fleming to you”!

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2021-10-20.

Japanese business etiquette

Category: Japanese business etiquette