A Guide to Workplace Communication in Japan for United States Americans

This guide provides a brief, non-comprehensive overview of academically-grounded frameworks, concepts, and observations which may prove useful to readers from the United States who plan to live and work in Japan. The empirical evidence presented here is drawn from the lived experiences of myself, the author, after a summer interning at an IT and systems engineering company in Osaka, Japan. I do not claim that this experience represents the majority corporate working culture of contemporary Japan or even of the city of Osaka. I will preface this article by clarifying that several characteristics of my company may distinguish it from the median corporate working experience in Japan, namely that it is small, on the scale of only around ten employees including three managers; somewhat liberal, being more adjacent to a startup than a traditional corporation and intentionally introducing lenience in issues like dress code and meeting etiquette; and composed almost entirely of engineers, meaning that most of my work and general experience was coloured by domain specificity in attitudes and conventions that may differ from a non-engineering office job. In spite of these factors, however, the analytical frameworks that I utilise to characterise these experiences have proven from a foundation of sociological and communicative study to be more generalisable to a diversity of workplace experiences and cultures.

To begin, I will offer a critique of the article “10 Japanese Business Etiquette Rules,” sourced from the website All About Japan. The article, like most others of its kind, has positive and negative aspects; summarily speaking, I don’t believe it to very much encompass the underlying Japanese cultural and working values that engender many of the specific etiquette rules that are listed in the article. Additionally, most of these rules are specific to a generic “business” or corporate setting, and do not account for specialised professional workplaces as was the case with my previous internship. However, I will concede that the article, being specifically entitled “10 Japanese Business Etiquette Rules,” is not claiming to feature or elucidate the scope of cultural insights that I seek to throughout my own article.

As far as positive aspects are concerned, the article is very specific in the rules that it outlines. It provides helpful graphics to explain its visually-dependent points, including a seating chart when discussing the seating arrangements of meetings and an image of a man holding his coat in the specific way that is expressed as necessary before entering an office building as is dictated by Japanese office etiquette. Many of the rules are accurate to what I experienced during my internship, including the need to queue for every elevator (which felt foreign to me as a young American) and wait for your seniors to sit down as well as to take a sip of their drink before you dare to do either (rules which I accidentally violated more than a few times, fortunately to no consequence). It also provides interesting and insightful justifications for some of the more specific or arbitrary rules that seem grounded in lived experience, for instance the fact that it is only considered proper to knock on a door three times before entering a business meeting, as a double knock is usually reserved for checking whether a toilet stall is occupied (Soranews24). Two of the ten rules of etiquette also focus specifically on business cards, something that I personally never once physically saw in my time interning in Osaka, and one rule of etiquette additionally focuses on a norm of bowing that is specifically stated to originate from the environments of “classier stores” (Soranews24). I found these to be interesting while reading the article specifically because I had never encountered them, and given my general experience with the rules and norms of Japanese culture, I am inclined to believe that these rules are the institutional norm for at least some number of corporations in contemporary Japan.

However, the article still suffers somewhat from a seemingly intentional lack of generality and explanation of the cultural tenets that underpin these rules of etiquette, as I previously stated. For example, a seating arrangement by rank that may seem quite convoluted to the American or Western imagination (that I also never personally encountered during my internship) is justified by the fact that “Japanese society is often concerned with relative status in social relationships” (Soranews24). However, beyond elaborating slightly on the personal characteristics that may cause an employee to be considered higher or lower status, little explanation is offered for this specific seating arrangement, nor the general meta-analysis of why Japanese employees are inclined to uphold these standards in the first place. Additionally, simplistic generalisations about status may be nuanced in certain contexts, as I observed when a coworker who was both senior in age and time having worked at my host company was purportedly paid a lower base salary than a younger new recruit. Several explanations were offered for this by my coworkers, namely a possible difference in educational attainment or linguistic ability (the older coworker actually spoke more languages than the younger one, but the second language that the younger one spoke was more actively used in business negotiations), but clearly the metrics which feed into the overall assessment of a person’s seniority may not accurately reflect every aspect of their treatment by their employers. Generally, as formerly stated, the rules of etiquette outlined in this article seem catered to a specific line of work as well as a specific genre of more traditional business cultures, meaning that the article cannot capture the experiences encountered in the many possible roles and companies with which readers may come to engage. As stated, I never had to use business cards during my internship, nor do I believe that my managers possessed any; our meeting table also did not feature the seating arrangements outlined in the article, being not only round (as opposed to square in the diagram) but also having folding wheeled chairs that changed position every time a (usually virtual) meeting was had. Although I think that the authors of the article implicitly acknowledge the limited scope of said article by only titling it and giving enough context for the 10 rules that are outlined (Soranews24), I still consider this a limitation of its usefulness to readers aspiring to live and work in Japan.

Thus, I will begin by offering an alternative approach that may be more useful for adapting in general to Japanese workplace customs, rather than specifically enumerating what would inevitably come to be an impossibly exhaustive list.

During my internship, the tool that I found most useful to conceptualising the many differences between Japanese and American workplaces was Erin Meyer’s culture map, which offers a framework of 8 different value axes upon each of which a given workplace may differ (Meyer), namely: high- versus low-context communication; direct versus indirect negative feedback; principles-first versus application-first persuasion; egalitarian versus hierarchical leadership; consensual versus top-down decisionmaking; task-based versus relationship-based trust foundations; confrontational versus confrontation-avoidant disagreement styles; and linear- versus flexible-time scheduling tendencies. It is particularly useful to observe the features between which American and Japanese culture are reported to differ by the greatest extent, most famously in the low-context communication of Americans versus the high-context communication of Japanese, and the more confrontational disagreement style of Americans versus the very confrontation-avoidant disagreement style of Japanese (Meyer). I can attest that these manifested directly in several communicative incidents in my workplace, where rejection was never straightforwardly communicated by my Japanese coworkers, and I had trouble eliciting honest and comprehensive assessments from them on how best to commonly move forward in certain situations (especially as we usually spoke through third-party interpretation). Especially in tandem with the tendency to avoid direct negative feedback also seen in Japanese workplaces, I see the acknowledgement of these differences as a useful lens through which to look at all rules of etiquette, whether formal or informal. As a foreigner, it is unlikely without significant time investment that one might understand every nuance in every unspoken rule or implication by their Japanese coworkers; thus, it seems productive to stay vigilant of rather than rotely memorise these differences and dynamically adapt to the often roundabout ways of speaking, ostensibly polite gestures, and extended periods of deliberation. I would sometimes apologise publicly for actions I probably would have defended in an American workplace. In general, Japanese work and life are governed by often-arbitrary adherence to often-arbitrary rules (at least to many an American mind), and integrating this fact into one’s approach may smoothen most workplace interactions regardless of seating or tea-drinking pecking orders.

I also see the meta-analysis of the culture map, and the analysis of meta-communication that it enables (Vedantam), to be very useful tools. Firstly, certain divergences may not end up having a noticeable impact on workplace culture due to the general context of one’s role; for example, although the United States features task-based trust versus Japan’s relationship-based trust, my being a short-term guest employee (and one who, at that, went above and beyond his work assignments) seemed to allow for trust in both my progressive task completion as well as my general character as my managers knew it. Additionally, the assessments made on the Meyer culture map may not universally reflect lived experience. For instance, while leadership in Japan is stated to be quite hierarchical, decisionmaking in general is listed as seemingly being consensual rather than top-down (Meyer). However, from private conversations with my Chinese coworkers (whom I often had an easier time relating to being Chinese American despite similar differences from American value mappings), decisionmaking at my company certainly did not seem to be genuinely consensual so much as inevitable in a wider hierarchical working culture. Their adherence to the decisions made by our boss, the company’s CEO, seemed to be more out of a sense of responsibility and sacrifice rather than a basic enthusiasm. I might personally conjecture that the consent listed on the Meyer culture map is manufactured rather than authentic, a strong possibility given the non-confrontational, high-context, and negativity-avoidant communicative style of the country. In any case, a singular framework can only be so useful, and analysing the meta-messaging of directly reported value alignments, whether on the level of the culture of a country, a city, or a specific company, can often be just as useful as the face value alignment itself (Vedantam). Other similar frameworks, such as Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, may offer other useful metrics that can nuance one’s existing approach (Hofstede; Martin and Nakayama); e.g., a high power distance (i.e. strong hierarchy) as well as a generally collectivist, cooperative (“feminine”), and uncertainty-avoidant culture may contribute to the perceived gap between consensual decisionmaking and the actual feelings my coworkers shared about the self-sacrificing nature of their work.

To conclude, the Japanese workplace is diverse depending on sector, company, and region; in general, however, outward appearances and inward beliefs generally interact in a volatile, impermanent, and interdependent (but not always correlated) manner. Even one’s inward beliefs themselves are nuanced and shaped by their context, and organisational practicalities mutually shape and are shaped by individual opinions. It would overall do the prospective American employee well to approach workplace interactions, the value statements that inform them, and the frameworks that categorise those values with a critical, holistic, and culturally-informed eye.

Works Cited

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2018). Intercultural communication in contexts (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Meyer, E. (2014, December 30). The culture map: The future of management [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf1ZI-O_9tU

Soranews24. (n.d.). 10 Japanese business etiquette rules. All About Japan. https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/2695/

Vedantam, S. (Host). (2021, April 26). Why conversations go wrong [Audio podcast episode]. In Hidden Brain. NPR. https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/why-conversations-go-wrong/