iiwake

There is no excuse for not having an umbrella in Japan

Japanese people who have recently arrived in the UK often wonder why British people do not use their umbrellas when it rains. I think this is partly to do with the different type of rain we have in the UK. Our weather forecasts are usually for “light showers” or “sunny intervals” or “occasional rain”. We do not have the “40% probability of rain” forecasts that you get in Japan. When it rains, it is usually not very heavy or very prolonged, unlike Japan in the rainy season. So British people can’t be bothered to carry or put up their umbrellas. The chances are it won’t rain at precisely the moment we are outside, and even if it does, it won’t be very heavy, so we will soon dry off, whereas in Japan, if it is summer, it is so humid, you can end up being damp all day if you get wet just once.

This British “can’t be bothered”, phlegmatic mentality does not work so well in Japan. There is no excuse other than that you are stupid or disorganised if you do not have an umbrella when the weather forecast says there is an 80% chance of rain.

Similarly, there is no excuse other than lack of self discipline if you are late for work or a meeting with a customer. Trains in Japan run on time. In the UK, our train systems are unreliable, and traffic congestion is a perennial problem, thanks to road works which take place during the day rather than at night as in Tokyo.

The further south you go in Europe, the less worried people are about punctuality and deadlines; what is known in Spain as the “mañana” (tomorrow, later, in the future) attitude. British people, who are of course northern European, want to be punctual but rarely are. We have almost given up trying because inevitably something will prevent us from being on time. We feel upset by being late, so we end up explaining in some detail what went wrong, to which the correct response, in the British mind, is sympathy. However, as I explained in a previous article in this series, such explanations can sound like iiwake (pointless excuses) in Japan.

A clinical trials manager at a Japanese pharmaceuticals company in the UK told me how a drugs trial she was conducting ended up being invalid, because a large number of the participants failed to complete all the tests. They simply did not turn up, because their car had broken down, they were hung-over, the trains weren’t running and so on. Her Japanese colleagues were not sympathetic. In Japan, participants would turn up. They felt she must have managed the trial badly, and indeed, I think she should have signed up even more participants than she did, as it could have been anticipated that a large percentage would drop out. It is best to be over-cautious, not optimistic, in setting deadlines when working with Japanese people, especially if part of your supply chain is in Europe.

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

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In Japanese business, apologising for others can be sincere

A manager in charge of the customer call center serving North America, told me last week that she trains the call center operatives not to say ‘sorry’ when they respond to complaining customers. I assumed this was because in the US, saying ‘sorry’ would be seen as an admission of fault, compromising the company in any future law suit. It turns out this is not the only reason. “American customers don’t want to hear ‘sorry’,” she said. “They think it’s not sincere, and in any case, it is not the operative’s own fault, so why should they say sorry?” “What do American customers want, then?” I asked. “Resolution” she said, and added that operatives are also told to ‘acknowledge’ the complaint, and make some kind of empathetic statement, to show they realise that the customer has had a bad time.

This discussion of the American approach to customer complaints came up because I was describing in a training session what I thought was the right approach to dealing with mistakes in a Japanese context: say sorry, don’t make excuses (iiwake) and describe how this mistake is not going to happen in future (hansei, which literally means ‘reflection’). I was contrasting this with the British approach, which is to say sorry, but in a transparently insincere way, and then to go into lengthy or pointless explanations of why the error occurred, which usually sound like iiwake to my and most Japanese people’s ears. An infamous example is the pre-recorded announcement you hear all too often British railways; “We would like to apologise for the late running of this train, this was due to the lateness of the incoming train”.

Often British customer-facing staff won’t say sorry at all, for the same reason that the American customer service manager gave, which is that they feel that because the mistake was not their fault, or in their control, they do not need to apologise. This is very different to the sense of collective responsibility that customer-facing staff have in Japan. They will say sorry, very sincerely, even if it is not their own individual fault, because they feel that they are part of the company that made the mistake, so they do have responsibility and could have had some kind of control or influence on the outcome. They also wish to say sorry for the customer having had a bad experience.

A few weeks after I took over a sales role in a Japanese company, we lost some business from an important customer. It turned out that over the course of at least a year, we had been delivering raw materials to the customer out of sync with their production schedule, and at a price much higher than our competitors. Instead of blaming me, my team leader (who was also new to the job) went with me to the customer, and together we bowed deep several times, said “taihen moshiwake gozaimasen” (literally – “there is absolutely no excuse for this”), promised to lower our prices and deliver at more convenient times. The customer let us have 20% of the business back, on a trial basis.

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”

Tag: iiwake

There is no excuse for not having an umbrella in Japan

In Japanese business, apologising for others can be sincere

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