[/floatr]PR.com: Read for free: “Behind the Japanese Mask” – New ebook explores Japanese culture and business practicesAs the Japanese proverb says, “Beginning is easy, continuing is hard” – a sentiment familiar to anyone trying to do business with Japan. This new ebook from Jonathan Rice takes readers below the surface of Japanese culture to explain the psychology behind the way Japanese people live and work, making it easier to build lasting, fruitful business relationships...Jonathan Rice is well qualified to explore where the mask ends and the face begins, having worked with the Japanese for over thirty years. A cross-cultural business consultant and lecturer, he has lived in Japan for ten years and lectures on working with the Japanese at Farnham Castle Centre for International Briefing. He is also the author of several books on cross-cultural issues, of which “Behind the Japanese Mask” is his most recent...more...
I haven't read it but the whole thing is here. This kind of prose doesn't fill me with optimism:
"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...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."
You know what he is on about but that doesn't seem like a very helpful or accurate way to express it. Anyway, it looks like it could be an entertaining read:
"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."
