Almost more than any nation, the Japanese have an international reputation for being businessmen. This is not meant to denigrate, like Napoleon’s description of England as a nation of shopkeepers, but is merely a statement of the way the world perceives that Japan has built itself up again after the cataclysm of the Second World War. The Japanese sarariman, conservatively dressed in his dark blue suit, white shirt and dark tie, carrying the ubiquitous A4 size brown envelope, is as much a symbol of modern Japan as the samurai is a symbol of her past. But how do we deal with these people, and how do we build successful business relationships with them?

BASIC VALUES

In an exercise a few years ago, Japanese businessmen were asked to compile a list of the basic values of their society and western society, and of the typical management systems in each culture. The results were revealing, not only in what they say about their own culture, but also in the way they contrast it with ‘western culture’ (if such a thing exists).

Their list of the basic values of the cultures included such obvious points as an ‘us’ culture in Japan, contrasted with a ‘me’ culture in the West, with its natural corollaries such as community spirit as against individualism; the concept that talents belong to society in Japan, while they belong to the individual in the West; and the concept that personal promotion is not advisable in Japan but ‘always the best’ in the West.

These are views the Japanese have picked up through exposure to Hollywood movies as much as in business dealings, but the broad truths are inescapable: the Japanese are a homogenous group while Western societies are heterogeneous individuals trying to outdo each other.

TYPICAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Their list of typical management systems points up several key lessons for anybody who aspires to working efficiently with the Japanese. At the top of their list is the principle of lifetime employment, which as we have already seen, is being seriously dented by the Golden Recession. But if lifetime employment is beginning to become less common, it is still far more usual than in the West. A Japanese businessman will want to stay with the same company all his working life, even if he does not succeed in his goal. The Japanese view of Westerners is that we tend to move around from company to company, selling our services to the highest bidder: the individual view of life as opposed to the group view of life. Japanese people would say that this is why Westerners are so concerned with salary levels (as if Japanese workers are not) and tend to judge levels of excellence in monetary terms. ‘I must be a better manager than you because I am earning more than you’. This is not a concept that the Japanese follow.

The fundamental importance of relationships

In dealing with Japanese people, it follows that if lifetime employment is the ideal, then loyalty to the company and being proud of the company you work for are key attributes in being successful. Japanese companies want to forge long-lasting business relationships, and these must be based around the people who represent the companies within the relationship. If they are given the impression by a potential partner that a particular individual is the only person to deal with, or that key members of the relationship teams are always moving on, then they will be very reluctant to enter into any sort of worthwhile business projects.

In European banks, as an example, there are frequently people with titles such as ‘Relationship Manager’ or ‘Personal Banker’, but these people move around just as frequently as anybody else in the highly impersonal world of financial services. Nobody in Japan would have a title like ‘Relationship Manager’: it would be self-evident to them that they all have a responsibility for managing, helping and building relationships throughout their working lives. Something like that is so fundamental to their business goals that it cannot be left to just one or two people who are called ‘Relationship Managers’.

Job descriptions

Another item on the Japanese list of typical business systems is ‘vague job descriptions’ in Japan, with explicit job descriptions being the norm in the West. That’s another reason why we have people called ‘Relationship Managers’: everybody has a precise role in the organisation and everybody needs to know what they are supposed to do. In the UK, a company cannot expect to qualify for the ‘Investors In People’ certification unless it has a comprehensive system of job descriptions and evaluation programmes for all employees. In Japan, the nearest most companies get to a job description is ‘Do whatever the company asks you to do’. Even that is unlikely to be written down, but providing that what the company asks you to do is legal, nobody seems to mind. There are almost no trades unions in Japan, with strict demarcation lines over who should do what. Unions are company-wide. Every employee of a company is a member of the union, but no outsider is a member.

Rewarding seniority

The issue of rewarding seniority as opposed to rewarding performance is another key difference between Japan and the West. Once again, the extremes of disparity between East and West are beginning to disappear as companies all over the world take on multinational values, but the Confucian ethic of respect for age is still firmly embedded in the Japanese psyche. This means not only that, for instance, there is a national holiday on Respect For The Aged Day (15 September), but also that the virtues of experience and the wisdom that experience brings are highly valued.

In business terms, it is very common for a significant part of the monthly salary level to be calculated by years of service, rather than on individual achievement. In the 1970s, there was an example of a factory cleaner who had been with the company for 35 years earning more than the most successful salesman in the company, who had only been with them for three years. These types of example are increasingly hard to find nowadays, but the principle of respect, and therefore reward, for loyalty and longevity is still prevalent.

Separation of rank and task

One of the more difficult concepts to grasp about Japanese corporations is this idea of the separation of rank and task. In the West, a businessman’s position defines his task. The production manager is responsible for production: he or she has a budget within which to work and a set of goals to achieve. Success or failure will be the production manager’s personal responsibility. In Japan, rank and task are two separate things.

The hierarchy of the big Japanese corporations is very clearly defined. The titles that people have carry significance beyond the company and give authority that has no real connection to the ability of the person to do the job. It is a bit like the army. The rank of captain or general denotes a status within the organisation, but it does not in any way define the job that the captain or general actually does. One captain might be commanding tanks in the desert; another might be supervising the preparation of the staff officers’ lunches.

Similarly, in Japan, the title of bucho ( = department chief) or kacho ( = section head) denotes a rank in the organisation, but does not actually define what the holder of the title does. These ranks, although having no legal status, are to be found in practically all companies in Japan, and enable a kacho in one company to talk to a kacho in another, knowing that they are of the same basic rank. It is always important to make sure that people who wish to talk business to each other are of similar rank: a managing director cannot do business with a mere section chief. The tasks that the section chief is responsible for are the tasks that his entire section is responsible for. While he may be the senior person, by service or age, in the section, he is not necessarily the driving force behind the section, nor even the ‘leader’ in western terms.

The separation of rank and task has a corollary – most Japanese managers follow a non-specialised career path, while we in the West like to think of ourselves as specialists. If a Westerner meets somebody for the first time, in a pub or at a party for example, the question, ‘What do you do?’ will no doubt be asked. The average Westerner will answer, ‘I’m an accountant,’ or ‘I’m a teacher’ or ‘I’m an airline pilot’. In response to the same question, a Japanese will say, ‘I work for Mitsui’ or ‘I work for Sony.’ The Westerner thinks of him- or herself as a specialist with a skill which some lucky organisation is getting the benefit of at the moment, but who may move on whenever they please.

A Westerner’s business card will not only show his name, status and company name, but also his qualifications – BA (Hons), MA, PhD, M. Inst. Mech. Eng., MP, DFC and bar – the list is endless. Most Japanese business cards will show the bearer’s company name, his status within the company and the usual company details. With the one regular exception of medical doctors, it is unusual for a Japanese to list his personal qualifications on a business card. It appears boastful, and anyway these skills are for the benefit of the company rather than of the individual.

Non-specialists

When a Japanese joins a company, he works in whatever position the company decides to put him in. It is not unusual for language graduates to be working in production engineering, or for physicists to be in the marketing department. A potential manager in a Japanese company will be transferred from department to department as he zigzags his way up the corporate ladder. A Western executive will begin at the bottom of his specialist department and work his way vertically up as the opportunity arises, but a Japanese will move from section to section, even when he has attained a very high rank. A big company will have a large number of these free-floating executives criss-crossing their organisation charts, a state of affairs that creates two distinct differences between Japanese and western corporations, however much their corporate organograms may appear to match.

The first difference is that the managers in a Japanese company are specialists, but not in the way we would understand it in the West. They are specialists in their own company: they know all the aspects of its work, they know its values and they know its people. Therefore they are instantly able to interpret the ways of their company to outsiders, and to act in a way that exactly conforms to its values. The company becomes far more ‘high context’, in cultural terms, than any western organisation, and communication is based more on people and their significance than on words alone. It is a state of affairs that few western companies would feel at ease with.

Understanding other departments

The second difference is that there is a general tendency for corporate politics to be less fractious in Japanese companies. When working in a British manufacturing company, I used to have to chair the monthly production planning meeting, when production always wanted to make what was easy to make, and sales wanted to have what was easy to sell. The two things were not always the same, and because our company, in common with most British companies, had bonus schemes for different parts of the company based on different criteria, there was little incentive for the two sides to reach agreement.

In Japan, on the other hand, a member of the sales team at that monthly meeting would know that he might well be transferred to the production department in the next few months, so any outcome that did not benefit both sides would be storing up trouble for him in the future. What is more, he would most probably have been part of the same team (even if it was in HR or accounts) as some of the people across the table at this meeting, so they would be good friends as well as colleagues. Agreement would be quickly reached.

The down side of this system only shows itself when things are not going well. The almost complete lack of new blood into an organisation means that bad habits do not get noticed, and in tough times it is the bad habits that bring an organisation down. In good times, though, the Japanese system merely supports and confirms an already successful structure. In the Golden Recession, more and more companies are beginning to appreciate the value of new blood to question old practices.

Pressure on performance

The final item on that list compiled by Japanese managers is the contrast between ‘no pressure on performance’ for Japanese workers, but ‘intense pressure on current performance’ for Westerners. This is, in my view, utterly untrue. The reason that the Japanese perceive the difference is that in the West we are all set individual targets, and the sales figures, production graphs and so on that abound in all offices are a constant reminder of whether or not we are achieving our own particular part of the project. It is simple to tell at any time whether or not any particular person is on target to succeed or fail, and to the Japanese, this is intense pressure. It is intense because it puts individuals in the spotlight, a place where most Japanese do not like to be.

However, we all know of many examples where a European salesman has achieved his annual targets with ten months of the year still to go: he has no pressure to help out his colleagues and so he is operating under no pressure at all. He might put himself under pressure to make it look as though his target was realistic rather than ridiculously understated, so that for the next year he also has a pressure-free target, but in general in the West, we do not work under intense pressure all the time.

In Japan, they do. This is because the individual is subordinate to the group, and it is the group’s achievements that are measured. The individual within the group has two pressures: the first is to ensure that he does not let down the group by failing to perform his duties to the highest level (and this is a very strong moral pressure indeed); and the second is to help anybody in the group who for whatever reason is not performing well, so that the group still achieves its target. That in anybody’s book (or in anybody from the West’s book) is pressure. Suicide in Japan among median age office workers is higher than in the West, and in Japan they have even had to invent a new word: karoshi meaning ‘death from overwork’.

BUSINESS ETIQUETTE

There are hundreds of books available that will tell you more about Japanese business etiquette than you wish to know. Every aspect of potential misunderstanding is brought under the microscope and dissected until it is unrecognisable. In reality, though, there are probably no more than three rules that will get you most of the way there: be on time, have plenty of business cards and don’t let anybody lose face. To that we should add the cardinal virtues of patience and persistence, and a complete understanding of your own position, which are things you should bring with you to any meeting with any culture including your own.

Punctuality

Being on time is important. Because so much of what is done in Japan is the mask rather than the reality, the start of any relationship carries special significance. The Japanese like punctuality, and they also like face to face meetings. You will find that in Japan you spend much more time travelling from office to office for meetings than you do in the West. Arriving on time is a courtesy that must be followed. If a meeting is scheduled for 3 p.m., for example, people who know what city traffic can be like in Japan will give themselves plenty of leeway to arrive on time. As a result, the coffee shops in and around any major office block will be packed from about a quarter to the hour to five minutes to the hour, full of people killing time until they can make their way to the meeting, arriving at the reception desk no later than three minutes before the appointed time.

Formal meetings

Meetings in Japan are formal. You will meet in a designated meeting room, not in anybody’s office, and the seating layout will always be the same: a table will confront you as you walk in to the room, with a window in the wall behind it. Nobody else will be there when you arrive: your hosts will turn up only when they are sure you are settled in with a cup of ocha (Japanese tea).

Visitors always sit on the side of the table facing the door, and the hosts will sit with their backs to the door. This custom apparently dates from feudal times when assassins were commonly prowling around. The host would always sit with his back to the door so that if an assassin burst in, the guests would see him first, and have a little time to draw their swords. The ever polite hosts would be hacked to pieces as they sat. This is a romantic idea, but as most assassins would have been paid by one party or the other, they knew who to attack whether they were facing the door or not. It must also be remembered that the inner walls of Japanese castles were shoji, made of ricepaper and balsa wood. Any sword sharp enough to cut a man’s head off at a stroke would also have been sharp enough to cut through paper and balsa without any difficulty.

BUSINESS CARDS

When the hosts come into the room, the very first thing that happens is the exchange of business cards ( =meishi). The business card is perhaps the most important tool in Japanese business. It is what identifies you, and it is the symbol of your relationship with your company. The collection of cards that any Japanese person accumulates becomes his address book, his telephone book and the index of his business relationships. It is therefore essential that you have a good stock of cards and that you give them out correctly.

There are one or two rules governing meishi. The first is that they should all be a standard size (91 x 55 mm) so that they fit into the plastic trays that every sarariman has in which to file his business cards. Too big, and they will never get into the file, too small and they will be lost among hundreds of others. Either way, your card will not be used again.

The second rule is that you must never give your card a second time to somebody you have already given it to, for that implies that you have forgotten the person concerned, a huge loss of face for all concerned. This can be difficult for visiting gaijin who only come to Japan once every six months or so, but in practice it is quite easy to stay clear of trouble. It is the custom for the host to give his card before the guest reciprocates, so that if you are not quite sure, but have not received one from your Japanese host, do not give one in return. He already knows you. If you are still insensitive enough to hand over your card, then best practice (if your solecism is pointed out) might be to suggest that your e-mail address or mobile phone number or something else on the card has changed since the last meeting. If you give your card to the same person two days in a row, then there is nothing to be done except to suggest you pay a little more attention to your hosts in future.

Business cards are handed over with both hands. If your hands are full of other people’s cards, which makes offering yours with two hands a difficult prospect, it is OK to use just the right hand. But not the left hand. Using the left hand is basically impolite, although it must be admitted it is not as terrible a faux pas as it might be in Arab cultures or in Korea or Thailand, for example. However, all Japanese used to be (are often still are) trained from birth to be right-handed, and it is still very rare to come across a Japanese who writes left-handed. The percentage of left-handed foreigners is much higher, and you have to be careful about using your left hand too much.

I am left-handed, and soon discovered that if I were to try to use chopsticks right-handed, as recommended in the etiquette books, I would not only find myself with massive laundry and dry cleaning bills for my shirts and suits, but I would also in all probability starve within a few weeks of arriving in Japan. So I used my left hand instead. Because I was aware that left-handedness was improper, I would always ask permission of my companions at any meal to eat with my left hand – a permission that was never refused and which showed that to a small extent at least, this gaijin understood Japanese etiquette.

The final and in many ways most important thing to remember about business cards is that you must NEVER write on one in the presence of the person who gave it to you. Even if he says, ‘Let me give you my home phone number,’ you should not write this on his card. You must pass the card back to him so that he can write on it himself.

GIFTS GIVEN AND RECEIVED

One other aspect of the Japanese business meeting that worries non-Japanese is gift giving. The Japanese love presenting gifts to people, and the assumption among non-Japanese is that they are always going to have to give a gift to a Japanese contact. This is not really true, and it is important that you do not get caught in a spiral of ever more expensive gifts as one party feels an obligation to reciprocate – but just a tiny bit more expensively – for the latest gift received.

There are a few rules about Japanese gift giving that should be remembered. Firstly, there are two major gift-giving seasons in Japan, mid-summer and year end, called ochugen (summer) and oseibo (year end). It would not be normal to bring a gift to a business meeting at any other time of the year, unless there was a specific reason for it. However, all visitors to Japan should always bring their company’s latest Report and Accounts, any relevant promotional material, brochures, samples, etc., as Japanese colleagues are always keen to have the maximum amount of information about anybody they work with.

What to give

The gifts that are given in Japan during the gift seasons are company to company rather than person to person, and therefore should not be too personal. Gifts are much more form than content, so the wrapping, for example, is often more important than the gift itself. A gift wrapped in Takashimaya Department Store paper, for example, will demonstrate that the giver has spared no expense in buying the gift, even if when it is opened up, it proves to be no more luxurious than, say, a face towel. The gift itself is almost always a practical item – soap, towels, cooking oil, beer and so on – and of little real value.

A British company should probably arm itself with something fairly inexpensive, peculiarly British and with some practical purpose, but not too personal to the giver or receiver: a Wedgwood ashtray, for example, or an illustrated book about Windsor Castle. There was a time when gifts could be very expensive, such as a gold watch or a crocodile handbag – but now that gifts of such value might be construed as bribes, you will not be on the receiving end of anything too costly. It is, however, very impolite indeed to refuse a gift, however much you may not want to accept yet another kilo of beautifully wrapped butter.

How and when to present a gift

Remember also that gifts are traditionally not opened in the presence of the giver. If you take a gift with you to a business meeting, it will be handed over at the end of the meeting. This is why all business gifts should be small enough to be kept inconspicuously in a briefcase: if the meeting goes badly, you never need to reveal that you even had a gift you were thinking about handing over. Your Japanese counterpart will thank you very sincerely for the gift, and immediately reciprocate, but neither of you should open the present there and then. If in doing so, you revealed by some slight involuntary twitch of a facial muscle that this was not the most splendid gift you had ever received, there would be huge loss of face all round. Much better to open the present quietly back at the office. Or even, as many Japanese do, just keep the present in its wrapping and hand it on unopened to the next person who deserves to be given a business gift.

LOSS OF FACE

Perhaps the most difficult thing for a foreigner to come to terms with in dealing with the Japanese is the issue of loss of face. It has been exaggerated to an extent that many people become over sensitive, but the issue is still very real. In essence, nobody – Eastern or Western – likes losing face, being made to look small or foolish in front of others. In Japan, however, this is taken to a greater extreme, so that nobody is ever put in a position where face might be lost.

The Japanese idea of the mask, and the real truth behind the mask, is so important that to have the mask damaged or stripped away – to lose face – is a great dishonour which can seriously compromise a person’s effectiveness at work. Whereas in the West vigorous arguments about work issues are commonplace and do not usually descend to the personal level, in Japan there is a risk that even the mildest form of disagreement can be seen as an attack on another person’s honour, with all the implications that brings.

We have already seen how the Japanese avoid having to say ‘no’, and indeed get the message across by saying ‘yes’ or ‘you may be right’. In a group, the result of this reluctance to express a contrary opinion means that no controversial or even vaguely difficult issues can be discussed. Nobody is going to speak out about an issue for fear of causing unexpected difficulties for somebody else in the meeting. However much the production director may believe that his present problems are caused by the purchasing department’s ridiculous cost-cutting efforts, he is not going to say so in a meeting where the sales director or chief accountant are also present, because he does not want the purchasing chief to lose face.

If a man causes another to lose face, then he loses face as well. And by extension, if others are present when a loss of face occurs, then they lose face too for having been powerless to stop the situation arising in the first place. So the situation does not arise. Ever. Things just do not get discussed in the way we discuss them in the West. Japanese meetings are to pass on information, not to reach decisions. They are for getting to know people and exchanging pleasantries, but they are not for raising difficult subjects. Visitors to Japan forget that at their peril.