On Track with the Japanese

Two days before I was to leave Tokyo during a recent business trip, I called my father's business associate, an old friend of the family. It was an important call for me. I hadn't seen him for twenty-five years, yet when I recall the history of my family's connection to Japan-which dates back to the 1920s-he always comes to mind. My memories of childhood and young adulthood in Tokyo are filled with images of him sitting in our living room, drinking whiskey and talking politics with my parents. At eighty-three, he is still very much involved in business, and had just recently received an award from the emperor for his service to Japan. "Quite a man," as my father says.

He laughed when I reintroduced myself over the phone. Immediately he wanted to know if I preferred Japanese or Western cuisine, and I felt his pleasure when I answered "Japanese." The night I arrived, he met me at my hotel in downtown Tokyo. I recognized him right away as he rose to greet me. His eyes were bright and warm; he was delighted that I still remembered how to speak Japanese, insisted I hadn't changed a bit since I was twenty-two, and asked after my parents. During dinner we spoke of prewar Japan and of how his uncle brought my father's eventual business partner out of Hitler's Germany in the Thirties, and later retired to a Shinto shrine. As he spoke of the past, our web of connections grew, and he repeatedly lifted the sake bottle to fill my cup.

The waitress brought the customary dessert melon, and there was a lull in the conversation. Then he reached into his bag, took out two neatly wrapped packages, and placed them on the table. "For your father," he said quickly. "Hot rice crackers-he likes them with his whiskey." He nodded at the second package and said, "Christmas light-bulb set-make sure you point out the adjustable blinkers."

I packed the gifts carefully, remembering long evenings of whiskey, hot crackers, and political discussions in my parents' home, especially when we held our annual party to celebrate the successful export to America of that year's Christmas lights. The thoughtfulness of the gifts were a token of his knowledge of and history with my father: they were intimate symbols of mutual understanding and trust.

My interest in the process of negotiating and communicating with the Japanese springs from my long history with that country. For the past fifteen years, I have taught and developed Japanese history and culture classes in companies such as GE and Motorola, and in association with cultural institutions like the Japan Society of Boston. In 1986, I began working in the MIT-Japan Program, the largest, most comprehensive program of applied Japanese studies in the world, where I continued to develop courses on cultural awareness as well as teach a series of seminars on Japanese history, culture, and society for our program's interns. As part of our curriculum, interns must take two years of language and culture classes, and participate in an orientation retreat before leaving for Japan. Though my seminars were popular and the students attentive, I began to notice that, within the context of "hands on" interactions such as exchanging letters and interviewing, students were failing to pick up on some of the obvious cues in Japanese culture.

Simultaneously, I had also been debriefing students who had recently returned from yearlong internships with some of the most prestigious university and corporate laboratories in Japan. During these discussions, I spent many hours listening as they described how they had coped with everything from the confusing first day to the inevitable good-bye party. As I listened, I realized that they too suffered from a lack of understanding about Japanese ethics and society. I decided to make our training program more interactive and started reviewing the classic business case studies usually used in cross-cultural programs, but soon realized that they were formal, dry, and lacked insight. I began to write short problem-solving case studies and found them to be an enormous classroom aid: the students' interest level soared and so did their ability to extract and identify specific behavioral cues. Abroad, interns found that interaction with their co-workers began to improve and many of them wrote to say that our problem-solving sessions had been a valuable preparation tool and a real boon to their experience in Japan.

As I collected information from my students, I saw patterns of interaction emerging. The stories they shared encouraged me to venture outside the academic arena to interview other professionals and gather their impressions and experiences of negotiating with the Japanese. Unlike the MIT interns, my newest subjects had had no intense preparation for their dealings with Japan, yet almost all had managed to develop a good rapport with their contacts in that country. I discovered that the dynamics they described paralleled the experiences of my students: in every case, the Japanese concentrated on building trust by following intricate cultural rituals, and cultivating an intimate knowledge of their counterparts-personally as well as their business backgrounds-over a period of time. This sort of relationship, which relies equally on factual and emotional knowledge, is what American businessmen typically find unusual and uncomfortable. Nonetheless, each person I spoke with felt that dealing with Japan was vital to their business interests. Interns and businessmen alike emphasized the long, slow journey from being an outsider in Japan to becoming a trusted member of a working group.

These cases are narrated almost entirely from a non-Japanese point of view, and I have tried to analyze them from a Japanese perspective as best I can, based on my knowledge of and experience with Japanese culture. Those who have found success in Japan have often had to learn to openly acknowledge problems without prejudging the Japanese and, in some cases, make hard choices in order to come to terms with certain issues of gender, race, and family commitments. It is often the case that expectations in Japan run counter to what many American professionals have become accustomed to in this country, and displaying an understanding of and a willingness to work within the system, rather than reacting on an emotional level, goes a long way toward reaching business goals. Throughout my research, I found that success in Japan is largely based upon reaching mutual understanding and building trust.