6
study of Japanese psychology and an interpretation of their social behaviour. The
author is one of the most influential Japanese psychiatrists. In his work he tries to
reinterpret Japanese culture on the ground of his own personal experience in the
United States, analysing a key-concept – amae – a Japanese term which does not
have any equivalent in any other language and which expresses a universal human
condition, the emotional dependence on others. Apart from the strictly
psychoanalytic exploration of this topic, Doi’s work highlights what is the main
object of my study and what I wish to demonstrate.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the nature of communicative
misunderstandings between two specific opposite cultural models: the Italian and
the Japanese one. I will try to find out the causes which contribute to generate
these misunderstandings between Italian and Japanese people discovering that the
main source of the communicative problems analysed seems to coincide in the
measure these people adopt to avoid these kind of incomprehensions: the use of
English as a neutral means of communication. The English language in fact,
although it is used to make verbal interactions clearer, is the chief source of
problems. To be more precise, this analysis of the above-mentioned
communicative gap will focus on a very limited sphere of action: the business
world. It will examine the difficulties Italian and Japanese companies have to face
when they do business together.
The idea for this topic was suggested to me by a stimulating course of study
on business English and business Japanese, at the University of Turin. Another
experience that was significant for this work has been the one-month homestay I
took in Japan. This trip, organized in September 2002 in Kanazawa, the chief
town of Ishikawa prefecture, offered me the chance to have a tangible
confirmation of what I had studied. The most substantial part of the problems
observed concerns the communication between these two countries and seems to
be strictly linked to a superficial understanding of the other party’ s language and
culture.
The number of Italian companies doing business with Japan is growing
rapidly and, especially in the last decades, Japan’ s interest for the Italian market
and products has been rising significantly. A large number of Japanese boys and
7
girls is taking a great interest in Italian culture; lots of courses that allow people to
learn Italian are spreading and, every year, the number of Japanese people going
to Italy on a journey is increasing. The growing number of contacts between Italy
and Japan, especially at the business level, has put into evidence the great amount
of discrepancies between these two (fundamentally opposite) cultures. This gap
displays itself in a variety of aspects, not only in everyday life but also within the
company. A selection of the most complex points will follow. Some of them will
be analysed and explained in more detail at the end of the second chapter:
ξ the importance of business cards for Japanese people
ξ Italian directness versus Japanese ambiguity in expressing their
thoughts
ξ Italian individualism versus Japanese conformism to the group
ξ the role of hierarchy which dominates every aspect of Japanese life
ξ the contrasting view of the written contract
ξ the concept of life-time employment in Japan and the role of the
company which takes care of employees
ξ the different seating order in business meetings
The peculiarities of Japanese people behaviour mentioned above and
analysed in this dissertation are the starting point for communicative
incomprehension. Their roots come from a very peculiar historical situation that
characterized Japan for about 300 years: isolationism or the so-called sakoku.
2
This policy was put into practice in its more radical form in 1639 by Iemitsu
Tokugawa, the personality which was at the top of the political and military
hierarchy in Japan during the years of the splendid Edo or Tokugawa period
(1600-1868). The peculiar structure of the Tokugawa political and social system
2
During the period of sakoku contacts with the external world were not completely abolished.
They were limited to Korea, China and, in the Western countries, to Holland. These contacts were
also restricted to Nagasaki harbour and a minimum weight was established for trade exchanges. As
to the Dutch, they had to live in the little Dejima Island, within Nagasaki harbour, and they were
allowed to leave it very rarely.
8
together with the isolation of the country from any contact with foreign
populations and cultures brought substantial benefits. It secured a long period of
peace and fostered the consolidation of the cultural and ethnic unit. The main goal
of this policy was to maintain the centralized feudal system (bakufu or military
government), preserving it from the two major Western threats, Christianity and
Western technology and weapons (which could have contributed to a possible
insurgence against the ruling family). This historical situation and its
consequences gave birth to particular customs, beliefs and social rules which are
still manifest in modern Japanese social life and which have influenced the sphere
of business, too. These characteristics can be grouped into three major features
that, as years went by, have played an important role in the process of
consolidating what we perceive as typical traits of Japanese behaviour.
The first feature to be underlined is the geographical position of Japan,
which led this population to rely only on internal bonds in order to keep social
order. This created in Japanese people a very strong devotion to the group and the
constant necessity to belong to it. The internal order, during Tokugawa period,
was maintained also thanks to a shared respect to the hierarchic relations that, in
such a close system, were inevitably strengthened. This aspect constitutes the
second of the above-cited features: the high level of institutionalisation and the
great importance given to hierarchy, whose roots are in the rigid four-level social
system of Tokugawa period. This system characterized Japan for a very long
period and imposed the subdivision of the population into four classes (samurai,
peasants, craftsmen and merchants) without any possible passage from one group
to the other. The third element is necessarily Confucianism. Its ideology reached
Japan from China at the beginning of the fifth century and still influences and
characterizes every aspect of Japanese life. Owing to a deep assimilation by
Japanese culture, Confucianist philosophy represents the core of Japanese
behaviour. The main and most typical Confucianist values are loyalty, filial love
and respect for elderly people. Little consideration was given to personal
problems in such a relation-dependent structure of society; this is the reason why
individualism never sprouted.
9
Considering the above-mentioned cultural traits and differences, we can
conclude that the only way of avoiding misunderstanding is to study and analyse
the other country’s culture, history, habits and traditions. Unfortunately, this way
of proceeding is time-consuming and businessmen do not have enough time to
devote to this kind of training courses. This is the reason why nowadays in many
companies people try to avoid the communication problem by using a language
that both parties are supposed to know. The exact definition for it is lingua franca
and the dubitative expression “are supposed to know” instead of “know” is not
without reason. By choosing this method, businessmen think to avoid troubles in
terms of money and misunderstandings but many a time this is not the case.
Taking into consideration the linguistic strategies observed in some
European companies by the scholar Sonja Vandermeeren in recent research, I am
going to compare them to those used by some Italian and Japanese companies,
which I managed to contact. In her essay ‘English as a lingua franca in written
corporate communication: findings from a European survey’ (in Bargiela-
Chiappini-Nickerson, 1999: 273-291) she tried to identify which language was
most frequently used during negotiations between German, French and Dutch
companies. Differently from Vandermeeren’ s study, the aim of the present
research is not to provide numerical data and statistics on how the choice of a
particular linguistic strategy could affect company’s production or other related
variables. Rather, I would like to highlight the main and most common points of
misunderstanding between Italy and Japan, finding out whether these linguistic
strategies are actually used in these countries, what is the role of English in
Japanese and Italian companies and which linguistic strategy is the most effective
for mutual comprehension.
This thesis is made up of three chapters. Each one is divided into a different
number of specific sections. Chapter 1 will provide the definition of what culture
is, both in the Eastern and in the Western world. Then, it will introduce the notion
of dimensions of cultures by explaining how they change from country to country.
It will analyse how different countries face the same problems in different ways
depending on their cultures. At the end of the chapter, the reader will be
10
introduced to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a well-known theory about the link
between language and culture.
Chapter 2 will introduce the notion of “negotiation” by analysing (as in the
case of culture in Chapter 1) its meaning in the Eastern and in the Western
cultures. After this introductory section, the chapter will move to the topic of
business communication considering one of the main causes of misunderstanding:
the difference between a “high-context” and a “low-context” culture. The
following part deals with the use of English as an international language. It tries
to clarify what a lingua franca is, and why and in what domains the English
language has achieved this status. The last section of the central part will
concentrate on the role of English in Japanese education from an historical point
of view. The chapter ends with a contrastive analysis of the key elements of
business negotiation in Europe and in the Asian countries.
Chapter 3, at last, will be the core of the whole work. It will present a case
study and how it has been carried out step by step. The chapter is divided into
four parts. The first one (3.1) explains the research itself and its purposes. 140
Piedmontese companies sited in the city of Turin and its immediate area have
been identified: 71 exporting to and the remaining 69 companies importing from
Japan. All of them have been contacted by phone, then an e-mail has been sent to
every company, containing a brief questionnaire in attachment to fill in. In the
second part (3.2) I will briefly introduce the research project that constituted the
stimulus to begin the present work. Section 3 (3.3) will lead the reader through the
various stages of this study’s practical realization (finding data, contacting
companies, creating and submitting the questionnaire etc.). The fourth and final
part of this chapter (3.4) will discuss the findings of this investigation, providing a
presentation of the collected data, which will be supported by graphics and tables.
In the very last part of the present dissertation I will interpret findings and results
in a functional way coming up with some conclusions. I will also try to solve the
questions I put at the beginning of this work and, at the same time, I will provide
suggestions in order to help people and businessmen filling the gap between
cultures.
11
1. Language and reality
1.1 Culture
“The cultural contrasts may be very great […] but the principle is the same:
language and culture have to be studied together, and to be brought into
interactive relation in successful discourse” (R. Quirk in Deena, 1982: vii).
1.1.1 Definition
Reflecting upon the above mentioned quotation I have decided to begin this
book with some questions: do people speaking different languages see the world
in a different way? Are these languages born to allow people to describe the
different realities they see? Or is it just a matter of geographical position? The
science that tries to answer these questions is sociolinguistics. Its aim is to analyse
the connection between language and people, between the linguistic system and
reality and nowadays new hypothesis are coming out.
The present research does not study language from such a specialistic point
of view, it is rather a reflection upon the possible answers to the previous
questions. I do think that there is a link that makes all these elements depending
one upon the other and the reason has to be found in people’s history. I think that
in the course of history people had to settle in specific geographical areas for a
variety of reasons such as climatic conditions, food supply and commerce. The
human societies that grew up had to deal with different situations, facing different
problems connected to their lifestyles, seeing and discovering different realities
and developing their own solutions to problems that are linked to the places they
live in. All these elements have contributed to create a language that reflects their
life in all its aspects. This is the reason why every language is characteristic of a
specific human society, containing in its lexis and phraseology features that are
typical of the culture of that specific group of people, which is unique.
Considering the word culture, a variety of definitions has been given and it
is curious how everyone of its meaning derives from its Latin source colere which
12
has to do with the tilling of soil.
1
This puts into evidence how culture is something
that every person learns, something that grows and changes with you and that is
permeable to the environment and the people around you.
If we consider the first three definitions given by the revised second edition
of The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2003) edited by Catherine Soanes,
we can observe some peculiarities that constitute the foundations of what we are
going to say. The first definition is ‘the arts and other manifestations of human
intellectual achievement regarded collectively’, the second one says ‘a refined
understanding or appreciation of this’, while the third one explains culture as ‘the
customs, institutions and achievements of a particular nation, people, or group’.
The way these meanings are ordered makes us reflect upon something very
important: in many Western languages the word ‘culture’ commonly means
‘refinement of the mind’ and, in particular, the results of such refinement, like
education, art and literature. Emphasis is put in the connection between culture
and civilization, something that the scholar Geert Hofstede calls ‘culture one’
(Hofstede, 1997: 5). The Oxford Compact English Dictionary (2003) presents a
much broader sense of this word only in third position. Here culture is explained
as the collection of all the behaviours that distinguish the members of one group
or category from another. We can include social actions such as greeting, eating,
showing or not showing feelings, making love, or maintaining body hygiene. This
is the so-called ‘culture two’, a very common concept among social
anthropologists. All the above listed features derive from one’s social
environment and not from one’s genes, this is why we have to distinguish
between what is learned (something specific and different for every group of
people), that is culture, and what is inherited (something common to every human
being) that is human nature. This concept is clearly explained in figure 1
(Hofstede, 1997: 6). The pyramid presents three levels in human mental
programming.
1
The ethimological information provided by The Oxford Compact English Dictionary (2000) for
the entry ‘culture’ is as follow: ORIGIN – Latin cultura ‘growing, cultivation’ from colere
‘cultivate’.
13
Fig.1 Three levels of uniqueness in human mental programming
The base of the triangle in Fig.1 represents human nature, which is what all
human beings have in common. It is the universal level of the mind, shared both
by the Japanese as well as by the Italian, something that cannot be changed or
modified.
The top of the pyramid is occupied by personality that is, on the other hand,
one’s unique personal set of mental programs. It is based upon traits that are
partly inherited from our individual set of genes and partly influenced by our
personal experience. Anyway, personality constitutes something that is different
for every human being, something that distinguishes a person from another one
belonging to the same group of people, for example, a Japanese from another
Japanese.
Lastly, in the central area there is culture. It stands between human nature
and personality because it is a collective phenomenon made of, and determined
by, the social environment around us. It is a set of traits that are learned and,
consequently, which are typical of a group of people. Culture constitutes the cause
of many misunderstandings, at the level of way of thinking and behaving but also
at the linguistic level. As we will see in the following chapters, speaking a
common language is not a guarantee of mutual understanding. People belonging
to different cultures present discrepancies that go beyond the linguistic system.
14
1.1.2 Cultural relativism
On a trip around the world some years ago, I bought three world maps. All
three maps were of the flat kind, projecting the surface of the globe on a
plane. The first was the classic type, with Europe and Africa in the middle,
the Americas to the West and Asia to the East; thus showing how the terms
‘the West’ and ‘the East’ were products of a Euro-centred world view. The
second map, which I bought in Hawaii, showed the Pacific Ocean in the
centre, with Asia and Africa on the left, and Europe—tiny—in the far upper
left-hand corner, and the Americas to the right. From Hawaii, the East lies
West and the West lies East! My third map, bought in New Zealand, was like
the second but upside-own: South on top and North at the bottom. Now
Europe appeared in the far lower right-hand corner. Which of these maps
was right? All three, of course! The Earth is round and any place on the
surface is as much the centre as any other. All people have considered their
country the centre of the world; the Chinese call China the ‘Middle
Kingdom’ (zhongguo), and the ancient Scandinavians called their country by
a similar name (midgaard). I believe that even today most citizens,
politicians and academics in any country in their heart feel that their country
is the Middle one; and they act correspondingly (Hofstede, 1997: xii).
This brief extract has been chosen to begin this section with because it
explains a crucial concept very well. The example of the three maps calls for a
brief consideration of the approach to a foreign and unknown culture. The
possible approaches, which can be noticed, are the inevitable result of total
immersion into a new culture. This can be experienced not only by people who
have been suddenly transplanted abroad and who are going to live for some time
in a new country. It also involves people who are on the point of approaching a
foreign culture by, for example, studying its language or embracing its religion
and ideology.
There is something called ‘culture shock’ which represents a phase of the
so-called ‘Adjustment Process in a New Culture’ (Levine-Adelman, 1982: 198). It
represents a moment of bewilderment and disorientation and it is something that
everyone who has undertaken a relatively long stay in a foreign country has
experienced. The diagram of Figure 2 illustrates the periods of adjustment in a
second culture and might apply to a one-year stay (approximately) in a foreign
culture.
15
(1)
Honeymoon
period (5)
Acceptance
and
integration
(3)
Initial
adjustment
(2) (4)
Culture Mental
shock isolation
Fig.2 The Adjustment Process in a New Culture
Each stage of the process is characterized by specific symptoms typifying
certain kinds of behaviour. The honeymoon period is the initial impact, when
many people are fascinated and excited by everything. The visitor is elated to be
in a new culture. After this immediate positive reaction, the visitor usually
experiences culture shock. During this phase the individual starts facing and
becoming aware of new problems such as housing, transportation, shopping and
language. Culture shock is not a very long stage. Soon after this, the foreigner’s
mood starts rising when he/she realizes that everyday activities such as housing
and shopping are no longer major problems. The visitor is not fluent in the
language spoken, yet, but basic ideas and feelings in the second language can be
expressed. Then, after a period of stasis, the visitor’s mood falls again into mental
isolation. Individuals have been away from their family and good friends for a
long period of time and may feel lonely. Frustration and sometimes a loss of self-
confidence result. Some individuals remain at this stage. Finally, and inevitably, a
routine is established and the visitor comes to a phase of acceptance and
integration into the new culture. He/she has accepted the habits, customs, foods,
and characteristics of the people in the new country. He/she feels now very
comfortable with new friends, colleagues and the new language.
Experiencing and being exposed to a new culture enables people to gain
insight into their own society and makes them reflect, in a more or less critical
16
way, upon the differences, pros and cons. The student of culture, as well as the
international traveller, finds different human societies thinking, feeling and acting
differently. Studying and approaching the foreign language or the new religion,
he/she has to be aware that there are no objective standards for considering one
group or category as intrinsically superior or inferior to another. This means that
studying differences in cultures among societies presupposes a position of
‘cultural relativism’, which is the orientation this dissertation will follow. The
French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has expressed it as follows:
Cultural relativism affirms that one culture has no absolute criteria for
judging the activities of another culture as “low” or “noble”. However, every
culture can and should apply such judgment to its own activities, because its
members are actors as well as observers
2
(Lévi-Strauss-Eribon, 1988:
229).
Cultural relativism simply calls for suspending judgment when dealing with
group or societies different from one’s own. This position should be followed not
only in everyday life, when we write about or study or meet an unknown group of
people speaking a different language or believing in different values. Managers or
businessmen who are to establish a deal with a foreign counterpart should also
take this position into consideration. It has been noticed that negotiation is more
likely to succeed when the parties concerned understand the reasons for the
differences in viewpoints. And speaking a common language is not always the
solution.
Information about the nature of the cultural differences between societies
should precede judgment and action. This is what is going to be done with the two
cultures analysed: the Italian and the Japanese one.
2
Translation by Geert Hofstede.
17
1.2 Dimensions of cultures
“[…] Common practices, not common values are what solve practical problems.
The differences in values should be understood, the differences in practices should
be resolved” (Hofstede, 1997: xiii).
1.2.1 What are they?
In order to provide a clear explanation of what dimensions of cultures are,
we have to distinguish between two basic concepts: nations and societies. The
invention of nations is a recent phenomenon in human history. They are political
units into which the entire world is divided and to one of which every human
being is supposed to belong. The nation system was introduced in the mid-
twentieth century, as a consequence of the colonial system which had developed
during the preceding three centuries. In this colonial period the advanced
countries of Western Europe divided among themselves virtually all the territories
of the globe, regardless of their cultural heritage. Such territories were easily
submitted because they were not held by another strong political power. What
happened to Africa is an example. There, national borders correspond more to the
logic of the colonial power than to the cultural dividing lines of the local
population. This is the reason why nations should not be equated to societies.
Historically, societies are organically developed forms of social organization
and, the present definition does not diverge from the original meaning very much.
According to The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (2003) a society is ‘a
particular community of people living in a country or region, and having shared
customs, laws and organizations’. So, the concept of a common culture applies
strictly speaking, more to societies than to nations. Today’s nations do not attain
the degree of internal homogeneity of the isolated, usually nonliterate societies
studied by anthropologists, but they are the source of a considerable amount of
common mental programming of their citizens. Nevertheless, rightly or wrongly,
collective properties keep on being ascribed to the citizens of certain countries:
people refer to ‘typically American’ or ‘typically Japanese’ behaviour. This
happens because using nationality as a criterion is a matter of expediency. It is
18
immensely easier to obtain data for nations than for organic homogeneous
societies.
In the first half of the twentieth century, social anthropology has developed
the conviction that all societies, modern or traditional, face the same basic
problems; only the answers differ from nation to nation. The immediate next step
was that social scientists, by means of statistical studies, attempted to identify
what problems were common to all societies. In 1954 two Americans, the
sociologist Alex Inkeles and the psychologist Daniel Levinson, in a broad survey
of the English-language literature on national culture, suggested three basic issues
as the common basic problems worldwide, (Inkeles-Levinson, 1969: pp. 447ff.):
1. Relation to authority
2. Conception of self, in particular:
a. the relationship between individual and society, and
b. the individual’s concept of masculinity and femininity
3. Ways of dealing with conflicts, including the control of aggression and
the expression of feelings.
Twenty years later, a similar study carried out by Geert Hofstede on a large
body of survey data about the values of people in over 50 countries around the
world made him identify similar common problems among societies, but with
solution differing from country to country. People analysed—employees working
for IBM—revealed to be very similar in all respects except nationality.
The four basic problem areas defined by Inkeles and Levinson and
empirically found by Hofstede in the IBM data represent dimensions of cultures.
These are:
1. Social inequality, including the relationship with authority;
2. The relationship between the individual and the group;
3. Concepts of masculinity and femininity: the social implications of having
been born as a boy or a girl;
4. Ways of dealing with uncertainty, relating to the control of aggression and
the expression of emotions.
19
According to Hofstede, a dimension is an aspect of a culture that can be
measured in relation to other cultures. The scholar has named these dimensions
as: 1. power distance, 2. collectivism versus individualism, 3. femininity versus
masculinity, 4. uncertainty avoidance. Together they form a four-dimensional (4-
D) model of differences among cultures. A score on each of the four dimensions
characterizes each country in this model. In order to fit the specific aim of the
present study, only three countries will be analysed: Italy, Great Britain and
Japan.
1.2.2 Three cultures compared: Italy, Great Britain and Japan
In this section I will briefly explore the results of the statistical studies about
the four dimensions of cultures. As it has been already said, these studies have
been carried out upon a set of 50 different nations and 3 multicountry regions
3
,
putting them into order according to the answers given by IBM employees when
some questionnaires were submitted to them. In order to focus on the specific
purpose of our study, I will not go into further details about the methodology of
the research, neither I will stop too long on the results of every country. Just some
basic information will be supplied about how the scores were calculated for every
dimension, concentrating the attention on the scores of the three countries in
question.
Power distance
Power distance is the first of the dimensions of national cultures. It refers to
the way power is distributed within society and its acceptance by people. It
concentrates on the difference between those who hold power and those affected
by power. In order to measure the countries’ orientation towards this topic, a
power distance index (PDI) has been calculated. The three survey questions used
to create the power distance index regard: 1) employees afraid of expressing
3
The 53 countries and regions chosen for the study are: Arab countries, Argentina, Australia,
Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, East Africa, Ecuador,
France, Finland, Germany FR, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia,
Iran, Ireland (Republic of), Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New
Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Portugal, Salvador, Singapore, South
Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, USA, Uruguay,
Venezuela, West Africa, Yugoslavia.
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