Japan is a strange country. It is such a strange country that the Japanese even think that Europeans and Americans are strange, and how foolish is that! For most Westerners, Japan is little more than a country a long way away, where they speak a bizarre and unintelligible language and where the word ‘inscrutable’ was probably invented. They make many things that we in the West use and need, from Toyota and Honda cars to Seiko watches, from Canon copiers to Minolta cameras, from Sony Walkmen to Toshiba laptops.

But when they sell us their goods, they tend to come over to our country and speak more or less fluent English, so why should we bother to learn more about their country, their customs and their way of doing business? If the Western rules of international behaviour and of doing business are dominant in the world – and they are – then are we not merely in danger of piling confusion upon misunderstanding by trying to learn more about the way they do things at home?

Well, if the nearest you want to get to Japan is to buy a Walkman or drive your Lexus around the streets of your home town, then perhaps you are right, and this book is not for you. However, if you have any business relationship with the Japanese, whether as customer, supplier, partner or competitor, then it certainly helps to have a better grasp of their society and culture, as well as their business practices.

Why Can’t They Be More Like Us?

The Japanese have never been easy to understand. What is more, they hardly ever try to be understood. For Western people, used to expressing our emotions and opinions clearly, Japanese reserve and inscrutability is not only impossible to work out, it is also very irritating.

Why can’t they be more like us? Why do they hide their feelings and their opinions so deftly and why do they not go about their business and their lives in the straightforward way that Europeans and Americans do?

Digital And Analogue

This commonly stated view begs the question of whether the Japanese sit in equal bafflement at the strange ways of the West: they do, but for them the question is more likely to be, ‘Why can’t we be more like them?’, which takes us to the heart of the Japanese character.

As one Japanese colleague explained it to me, Westerners are digital but the Japanese are analogue. Whereas Western people are individuals, who have intrinsic merit of their own and who do not feel the need to define themselves in terms of other people, Japanese can only operate as part of a larger system, like one hand on the face of an analogue clock, only of value when in a relationship with somebody or something else.

Ask a Brit, for example, ‘Who is that person over there?’ and he will reply, ‘She is my sister.’ In reply to the same question, a Japanese would say, 'I am her brother.’ The end result is the same – we know who that person over there is – but for the Briton, he is at the centre of the world, and the person over there is defined in terms of the speaker. If there was nobody over there, the Westerner would still have a value, in his eyes at least.

The Japanese response implies that the person over there is at the centre of the relationship, and that the speaker only has a definition in terms of this other person. Take them away, and how is the Japanese going to define himself? Take away the hour hand, and how can the minute hand tell the time by itself?

Is It Worth Trying To Understand Them?

One very successful British businessman, who ran a thriving trading house in Tokyo for many years, claimed to have made no attempt whatsoever to understand his hosts. He concluded early in his stay in Japan that they were from another planet, a very friendly planet it must be admitted but a different planet all the same.

He used to boast that he had learnt only two words of Japanese in the 20 years he had lived there. The first word was urusai, which means ‘troublesome’ or ‘a nuisance’, which he would shout at full volume across his office or into the street below if something got on his nerves. The second word was mizuwari, which means ‘whisky and water’, his panacea against all the urusai things that he came up against in his daily life.

He maintained that with these two expressions, his grasp of the useful words in the Japanese vocabulary was complete and that to learn too much about the Japanese was counter-productive: they all knew from their first glimpse of him that he was a foreigner, so the Japanese would modify their behaviour to deal with him.

If he modified his Western behaviour too much when dealing with the Japanese, there was a grave danger of the two sides overcompensating for each other, which would merely cause even greater confusion and mistrust than was there already. He would argue that his success in selling imported goods to the Japanese proved his theory.

This theory works in practice only if you do not wish to build a strong relationship with your Japanese contacts, and if you have something so desirable for them to buy that they will in any case beat a path to your door. Most of us, however, in dealing with Japan or any other alien business culture, do not have this better mousetrap which will allow us to shout ‘urusai’ and call for a mizuwari when times get tough.

Most of us have to take a few hesitant steps in the direction of the other culture if we are to succeed in establishing a relationship. And relationships, as we shall see, are at the core of conducting business successfully with the Japanese.

Uchi And Soto – Insiders And Outsiders

Japanese culture is unique. It must be, because the Japanese keep on telling us so. On the other hand, all cultures are a little different from each other, so all cultures must be unique. It’s just that the Japanese culture is more ‘unique’ than the rest. Its uniqueness lies in the clear distinction it has made historically between insiders and outsiders, between the soto and the uchi. Soto means ‘outside’ in Japanese; uchi means ‘inside’.

The homogeneity of the Japanese race over 2,000 years or more has created a society in which the difference between its members and those who are mere visitors has become vast – not just in looks and etiquette but in ways of thinking and acting as well.

What is more, the Japanese distinguish between soto and uchi in their behaviour towards the different groups. They act towards foreigners in a way in which they would not behave with fellow Japanese, and when they are overseas, they happily do things they would never think of doing at home.

With those who are uchi the Japanese will disclose their deepest secrets, but with those who are soto, the best you can hope for is a kind of benign neglect. Total politeness and civility at all times, of course, will be the hallmark of their behaviour, but there is no chance they will talk about things that are dear to their hearts, unless the weather or the local restaurants are what turns them on.

The Japanese mask their feelings in dealing with each other, just as they do in dealing with outsiders. Not all Japanese are as uchi as each other, and degrees of separation are carefully maintained within Japanese society just as they are with outsiders. You have only to watch the Japanese sarariman on a train in the rush hour, all elbows and shoving for a seat in exact duplication of his Western counterpart, to see that on public transport, everybody is soto.

Once they reach their offices, they are back uchi and they treat their colleagues as insiders. It is not a matter of friendship, it is a matter of relationship. Office colleagues are insiders, whether they like each other or not. Personal feelings are irrelevant, because anybody within the same group, the same family, company or school, is inside and all insiders are treated equally. True feelings are carefully masked.

The Virtue Of Masking True Feelings

The mask is a common feature of Japanese culture, from the Noh and Kabuki dramas to folk songs and even children’s television, where one of the best loved adventure series of the past 30 years was called Kamen Raida, which means ‘Masked Rider’. It is pointless to expect Japan and the Japanese to be easily interpreted by outsiders when the masking of true feelings and intentions is, and always has been, such a virtue in Japan.

Looking For The Truth Behind The Words

In all areas of Japanese life, but especially in business negotiations, the Japanese make use of tatemae and hon-ne. Tatemae is usually translated as ‘the official position’ and is what will be expressed in words. The hon-ne or ‘true voice’ is unlikely ever to be heard out loud, although the Japanese themselves can understand it from the range of emotions and expressions used in stating the official position.

The art of being able to hear the true voice of Japanese feelings is one that is not easily acquired, but at least if you are aware that all Japanese expect there to be a difference between what is said and what is meant, then you will learn to look for the truths between the words, rather than the simple facts that the words may convey.

This is yet another mask of Japanese feelings and intentions, which can be very confusing for a newcomer to their way of doing things. However, you have to remember that this is not a show they put on especially for the foreigners or other people who are, for one reason or another, soto. It is the way they conduct themselves even within their most intimate circles: it is their natural way of doing things.

The Changing Face Of Japan

Perhaps at this stage, before we have become too dogmatic in our statements of how all Japanese do everything, we should note that Japan is changing. Japan has always been changing, even in the feudal period when the status quo was meant to be preserved absolutely and change was proscribed by law.

However, in the latter years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, there is little doubt that the changes that are taking place in Japanese society are significant and accelerating.

The Influence Of Post-War Hardship And Poverty

There is a huge difference in attitude between the younger generation, those under about 45 years of age, and the older generation. The older Japanese remember the post-war years of hardship and poverty, when the aim of everybody was to have enough money to buy a Parker pen for the office and an air-conditioning unit for the apartment; when the most important thing was to have a job, any job, which would bring in an income; and when the art of saving for harder times was firmly established.

The impact of the Second World War on Japanese society was total – they entered the 1950s with a new constitution, a recently undeified Emperor and a country in ruins. Those who lived through those years, and appreciated the achievement of the nation’s material aims, have a very different attitude towards life, work and the family than those who are too young to remember the difficult days, except through the memories of their parents and grandparents.

The younger Japanese are more sophisticated than their parents, they are less acquisitive because they already have everything, and they are far more influenced by the rest of the world, encountered on television, in the movies and in real life, than the Japanese who were educated before the war or in the early post-war years.

But Some Things Remain Unchanged

However, it is also true that in many ways Japan is not changing. There are certain rules and habits of Japanese society that do not change because economic conditions vary, or because McDonald’s and Pizza Hut are as widely available in Japan as noodles and sashimi. Japan is still a foreign country.

A former resident of Japan, who returned for the first time in over 20 years in 2003, remarked that it was amazing how much had not changed, both physically and in the manners and customs of the Japanese, in two decades, rather than how much had changed. ‘I had the feeling I could get straight back into Tokyo life even after all this time,’ she said.

Different Impressions

We should also notice at this early stage that everybody’s impression of Japan is a different one. Although the Japanese love to start their sentences with the phrase ‘We Japanese’, as though the views and understandings of every one of the 125 million occupants of the islands of Japan are exactly the same, this is self-evidently not so. But for foreigners, coming from the outside and remaining on the outside even though they are doing their best to experience Japan, the impressions of Japan are bound to be a very mixed bag.

A colleague of mine, who worked for several years in Japan, mentioned that he found it very interesting that all Japanese placed such importance on what blood group a person has. He said that the Japanese consider blood group to be a very good way of judging character, and that Type A people are different (in what ways I forget) from Type AB people. This remark sparked a lively debate because in 20 years of living and working with the Japanese, I had never come across this particular habit of ‘all Japanese’.

However, my assertion that all Japanese insist on wearing exactly the right uniform for whatever activity they are involved in, drew equal reservations from him. He cited several instances of inappropriately dressed golfers, and of hikers on Mount Fuji suffering from exposure and even death because they were not taking even the most basic of precautions against the weather.

The truth of both matters is that a lot of Japanese try to look the part whatever they are doing, whether it is cycling in the full Tour de France kit or wearing company uniforms at work; many Japanese also believe that a person’s character can be told by the blood group, but neither habit is something that all Japanese involve themselves in all of the time.

My colleague came across the blood group idea very shortly after he arrived in Japan, so it stuck with him. I appeared on a tennis court in Japan within the first few weeks of arriving there, and was greeted on court by people who looked to have flown in straight from Wimbledon. The fact that they were no better players than me (in brown shorts, trainers and an old T-shirt) made me believe that appearances are important to all Japanese, even if the substance is not there. We were both wrong in applying the particular to the general view of Japan – a sin, I must add, that many Japanese are also guilty of.

An Abundance Of Writings On Japan

What is more, there is something about Japan that makes foreigners want to pontificate about it (and this book is, I suppose, merely adding to the weight of pontifications) in print and in the broadcast media as often as possible. There are people who have made a career out of not knowing about Japan, as though this strange country and its people will yield its secrets more readily to the untutored eye than to the so-called expert.

Books used to have titles like Too Far East Too Long or A Lifetime In Japan, but now the trend is towards Instant Japanese and Glimpses of Japan. Soon, no doubt, somebody will be rushing into print with My 45 Minutes in Transit at Narita Airport, or producing a television programme about Japan as they overfly Kyushu at night. Although most of these books and programmes have some merit, they frequently give quite different opinions, and quite different answers to the same questions, so the truth is hard to discern.

The Truth Behind The Mask

But what is the truth about Japan? Is it the modern Tokyo, with the modern skyscrapers of Shinjuku and Roppongi, or is it the Yasukuni Shrine, where the war dead are remembered? Is it Mount Fuji or the Shinkansen bullet train? Is it Honda and National Panasonic and Casio or is it the Gion district of Kyoto where the geisha can still be seeing scurrying to their evening engagements? Is it the schoolchildren in their quaint sailor suits or the sharply dressed yakuza, the only surviving wearers of spats in the modern world?

Is it the ferro-concrete Osaka Castle, rebuilt after the war, or the tiny wooden redoubt of Inuyama, dating back over 400 years to the days when the civil wars were at their most vicious? Is it a Sony Playstation or sumo wrestling? How can we reconcile the beauty and peace of ikebana flower arrangements with the turbulent pace of modern city life in Japan? Which of these is the Japanese mask and which is the true face?

The answer is that all these aspects of Japan are the mask, and they are all also the true face of Japan. Sometimes the mask is the true face, and sometimes it is just a mask.