It is said that the Japanese language is one of the two or three most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn. It is up there with Hungarian and Finnish at the top of the incomprehensibility charts. It is therefore beyond the scope of this book to give more than a basic smattering of Japanese words which might be of use to the visiting business person. If you want to learn the language, there is only one way to do it and that is through a concentrated learning programme and, even more importantly, constant practice in everyday life.

THE THINKING BEHIND THE WORDS

What we can look at within the context of this book is a basic understanding of the way that the language works, and the way it differs from the English language. Misunderstandings between people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds do not usually originate in the words used to get the message across – they arise in the thinking behind the words and in the way the same words are used in different ways in different languages.

It is always wise to remember that almost every Japanese person, apart from a handful of virtually bilingual people, will be thinking in Japanese when they speak in English. This means that unless you understand the basic concepts of the way the Japanese language works, and the way thoughts and sentences are formed, you will run a very great risk of misunderstanding what they actually mean, as opposed to the words they speak. What is more, the same will be true for you speaking in English to all but the very best English speakers: your listeners will, to some extent at least, be translating your words back into Japanese, and drawing Japanese conclusions from the English words you have spoken. To make matters worse, more often than not, neither party will be aware that there has been any misunderstanding at all.

THE ORIGINS OF JAPANESE

Japanese and English are as different as two languages can be. Japanese is, in fact, different from every other language on the planet, bearing only very slight connections to any other language. There continues to be a scholarly debate on where the language originated, with experts noting connections with Korean, Finnish, Turkish and some Indian and Australasian languages, while other experts note no such connections and consider Japanese to be a hybrid of many other languages. Certainly, modern Japanese vocabulary borrows from Chinese and, inevitably, English, but the grammar, pronunciation and syntax is all its own.

READING AND WRITING JAPANESE

Perhaps the key issue in understanding Japanese is to look at the way it is written. It was very bad luck for the Japanese that their language developed first of all in a purely spoken form, and it was not until the first Buddhist missionaries came over from the mainland to Japan around the fifth century AD that the Japanese saw language written down. The bad luck for the Japanese was that the ideographic style of writing Chinese, where each character has a meaning but no phonetic element, was totally unsuited to writing Japanese. If Japan had been next door to Italy or Arabia, Greece or Russia, or almost anywhere rather than China, the Japanese language would have developed in a quite different way, and the learning of the language would not be the huge undertaking it is, for both foreigners and the Japanese themselves.

Japanese and Chinese – two very different languages

Chinese and Japanese could not be more different languages. Chinese is a language without verb endings, plurals, tense differentials or even, originally, more than one syllable to each word. What’s more, it is spoken in a range of different tones, the meaning changing according to the tone used. Japanese, on the other hand, is a highly inflected language; with different verb endings for past, present and future; with different suffixes for subject and object; very polysyllabic; and without any tonal aspect.

In Chinese, a sentence is constructed with the subject of the sentence first, then the verb, then the object. In Japanese, the order is subject (if it is stated, which it often is not), object, verb. So, where the Chinese say, ‘The man buys a book’, the Japanese say, ‘The man a book buys’ . On top of this, Japanese is full of different levels of vocabulary according to whether the speaker is considered more or less important than the person they are talking to, whether the speaker is male or female and whether they are speaking highly informally, within the family for example. The vocabulary of the two languages was, originally, totally different, and the initial attempts by the Japanese to write their language using the Chinese script were an ignominious failure.

A Chinese character, for example, has a clear meaning (sun), but the pronunciation of that character is not necessarily linked to its shape. This is a huge advantage in China, where the pronunciation of the language changes drastically across the country. Spoken Mandarin, the language of Beijing, is not readily understandable by Shanghainese, nor by Southern Chinese who speak Cantonese. But the written language is understandable by all. In Japan, where everybody speaks the same language, this absence of a phonetic link in the writing is a huge disadvantage.

The development of writing in Japanese

This presented a dilemma to the Japanese of 1,500 years ago when they first came across the idea of writing things down. They realised the advantages of not having to remember everything in their heads from now on, but they also recognised how difficult it would be to write Japanese using Chinese characters. There were basically three options. Firstly, they could carry on as before, as though the Chinese missionaries had never arrived, and continue with Japanese as purely a spoken language, used by a people who had no concept of writing. However, once they discovered writing. they could not undiscover it: the need for a system of writing was too great. The second option would be to acknowledge that Japanese could not be written down using Chinese characters, and to solve the problem by switching from speaking Japanese to speaking Chinese. The third option was to create a hybrid written language, based on Chinese characters combined with a phonetic ‘alphabet’ to record case endings, tenses and so on.

Adopting the Chinese language

The third option was the one that has eventually evolved, but not without the Japanese court at first trying option two. For many years in the fifth and sixth centuries AD, there seems to have been a concerted effort by the Japanese court to speak, write and read only Chinese. However, there was one fundamental flaw in the plan: the rest of the Japanese population, blissfully ignorant of the advantages of reading and writing, carried on speaking in Japanese. This meant that the court had to use the native tongue when dealing with the farmers, artisans and merchants who lived outside the court and who supplied food, clothing and all other necessities of life to the imperial retinue. So the experiment of using nothing but an imported language was dropped, but not until a vast number of words had been brought permanently into the Japanese vocabulary and a vast change made to the native language.

Connections with Chinese

Japanese today is grammatically unique, but in its vocabulary there are now many obvious connections with Chinese. They should not be overstated, because this huge importation of Chinese words happened at least 500 years before English imported many French words after the Norman Conquest, and today the English and French languages are entirely distinct. Japanese and Chinese, having no common grammatical heritage, are far more different from each other than English and French.

The Sinification of Japanese has complicated the vocabulary very much. That simple character meaning ‘sun’ can now be pronounced in four or five different ways, depending on the usage and meaning. Originally, there was just one Japanese word, pronounced hi, meaning ‘sun’, and by extension ‘day’ . The Chinese missionaries pronounced that character differently, so there are now two further pronunciations of the character, derived from different strains of Chinese: nichi and jitsu. There is also ka, which is a suffix for counting days (don’t ask), as in the town name Yokkaichi, meaning ‘Four Day Market’.

The next question is, how do you know when to pronounce the character hi, when is it jitsu and when is it nichi? Well, there is no hard and fast rule – it is all a matter of usage. When you are talking of the sun in the sky, then the pronunciation is hi. Hi wa kyo tsuyoi desu means ‘The sun is strong today’. In compound words, a Chinese pronunciation is generally used. ‘Sunday’ is nichiyobi, the nichi and the bi parts of the word both being written with the same character. ‘Yesterday’ is sakujitsu, making use of the jitsu pronunciation. Sakunichi would be wrong, but there’s no real logic to it.

The complexities of learning Japanese

The point of all this is not simply to confuse: it is to show what an ordeal the learning of the language can be. For most Westerners, learning to read and write involves learning an alphabet of 26 letters (or thereabouts) in upper and lower case, ten numerals from 0 to 9, plus a few accents and other punctuation marks. The entire body of English literature, every washing machine instruction manual and even the Daily Mirror can be read by anybody who has mastered no more than 70 or 80 different hieroglyphics. Because they are phonetic, it is possible to pronounce words without knowing their meaning, and with only 26 letters to choose from, looking up the meaning in a dictionary is simple enough. It’s really not that difficult to learn to read and write English. Even a six year old could do it.

Japanese, on the other hand, requires a huge effort. Each character is different, and not necessarily connected to other characters of a similar shape either by pronunciation or meaning. So is, as we have seen, hi or nichi or jitsu meaning ‘sun’ or ‘day’ but a similar character: with one more brush stroke on top, is pronounced haku or byaku or shiro and means ‘white’. Every character must therefore be learned separately, and in the absence of any logic, each one must be learnt purely by rote.

There are not, of course, just 26 characters, any more than English consists of just 26 words. My standard Japanese-English character dictionary contains 5,446 different characters, and that is merely for foreign students of the language. A Japanese dictionary for native speakers would contain many more. Imagine if you have to learn to read and write over 5,000 different pictures (for that in essence is what they are), none of which have any logical way of being sorted by meaning, pronunciation or way of writing. It is a mountainous task, a huge feat of determination and memory, but one which every Japanese schoolchild has to go through.

The process of learning to read and write Japanese

It is something that takes up much of every Japanese child’s six years of elementary schooling, so that by the time they move on to their secondary schools, they are literate enough to write the essays and reports needed to study other subjects. They will by this time have mastered 881 basic characters (kanji = Chinese characters), and by the time they leave school, they must know and use 1,850 characters (plus about 100 more in common use in personal names) which will enable them to read all newspapers and magazines. They will also be masters of the two phonetic syllabaries, each containing 50 ‘letters’, which the Japanese have devised to spell out the verb endings and other grammatical variations that so confused their ancestors. These syllabaries, known as katakana (= square, or straightsided letters) and hiragana (= cursive, or ordinary letters) are in everyday use and are the building blocks on which foreigners begin the daunting task of learning to read and write the language.

DON’T ASK WHY

Learning the language requires three characteristics in profusion: patience, an excellent visual memory and an acceptance of the way things are. It requires patience, coupled with determination and persistence, because learning to read and write is a long haul. This is another reason why patience is considered one of the highest virtues by the Japanese. It requires an excellent visual memory because without being able to retain the different images in the mind, and to recognise patterns within them, it would be impossible ever to become competent in written Japanese.

Most of all, it requires an unquestioning mind. A Japanese elementary school pupil is encouraged to ask ‘how’ – as in ‘How do I write this character?’ – and ‘what’ – as in ‘What does this character mean?’ – but never to ask ‘why’, – as in ‘Why does this character look like this?’ – because there is no answer to that question. There is, lost back in the mists of time, some connection between the shape of the characters and the shape of the thing they represent (the character meaning ‘sun’ is meant to be a picture of the sun with a wispy cloud floating across it, but it has become stylised to the point of unrecognisability), but modern Japanese characters cannot be worked out logically. The same can be said of the Western alphabet (Why is an ‘a’ shaped like that?) but with only 26 illogical shapes to deal with, there are still plenty of other entirely reasonable questions to be asked.

You might want to suggest at this stage that if Japanese can be written phonetically with two 50-character syllabaries, why don’t they throw out the characters altogether and make the whole learning process much easier? Well, this solution has been thought of, as has the idea of using the western alphabet to write Japanese, which can be done, as it can with Chinese or Arabic. However, Japanese words are on the whole so short that many sounds have multiple meanings, and are only distinguishable by the way they are written. So, for example, the sound ‘ka’ has 15 different meanings, not counting ‘the sound made by a crow’, which strictly speaking is ‘kaa’. These meanings range from the interrogative particle, the sound that comes at the end of every question, to ‘mosquito’, ‘smell’, ‘frame’, ‘minority’ and ‘a load for a man’, among others.

It is not unusual to see Japanese outlining the shapes of characters with their fingers as they talk, in order to make clear exactly what they are talking about. Japanese is full of puns and similar words which would cause total confusion if characters were abolished. Kisha wa kisha de kisha shimashita is a perfectly sensible sentence using the word kisha three times with three entirely different meanings. The translation is ‘The reporter returned to his office by train’. Kisha can mean ‘reporter’, ‘steam train’ and ‘returning to the office’, depending on which characters are employed.

The end result of having to spend the best part of six years learning to read and write is that the Japanese do not learn to ask the question ‘why’. They acquire brilliant retentive memories for the assimilation of facts, and incidentally the spatial awareness developed by the effort of learning all those different shapes helps a great deal in mathematics, but they do not learn to ask ‘why’.

And if children up to the age of ten or 11 are not encouraged to ask why, you can be sure that as they grow older, they will not develop the habit either. The straitjacket imposed by the need to learn the language means that Japanese people are, as a general rule, great with facts but not so good at drawing conclusions from the facts. In business, if you ask a Japanese colleague, ‘What do you think about this problem?’ you will be greeted with a startled stare. If you ask, ‘What do you know about this problem?’, you will be given all the facts that could possibly be relevant, along with many that are not.

This is not to say that all Japanese are unable to draw conclusions from a set of facts, merely that their educational system does not encourage freedom of thought. This is in many cases a great strength: too many Western people believe that they should have their own opinion about everything, regardless of the facts. The Japanese preference for facts over opinions usually stands them in very good stead.

PRONUNCIATION

Japanese is a simple language to pronounce. There are only five vowel sounds, all of which are short. They are ‘a’, as in ‘pat’; ‘i’, as in ‘pit’; ‘u’, as in ‘put’; ‘e’ as in ‘pet’; and ‘o’ as in ‘pot’. Sometimes the vowels are doubled, to lengthen them, but the basic sound remains the same. The only thing that changes is the length of time the sound is held. So kyo, meaning ‘today’ is pronounced with a long ‘o’. You still keep you mouth in the same shape, but double the length of time, which makes the word sound as though it rhymes with ‘roar’. Japanese has none of the impure vowel sounds of English.

The Japanese language works in syllables, not letters, so that every syllable ends with a vowel sound or – the one exception – an ‘n’ sound. All Japanese words, therefore, when transliterated into the western alphabet, end either with a vowel or the letter ‘n’. They also do not use some of the consonant/vowel combinations we use, such as ‘ti’ (which becomes ‘chi’ in Japanese) and ‘si’, (which becomes ‘shi’).

And there is the problem, to western ears, of the l and ‘r’ sounds. The Japanese ‘l’/‘r’ is always transliterated as an ‘r’, but the sound is in truth halfway between ‘r’ and ‘I’, with a touch of ‘d’ in there as well. It is a difficult sound to master. If you put your tongue at the top of your mouth as though you were going to say a word beginning with ‘d’, and then say an ‘r’ word instead, you will be getting close to the sound of the Japanese ‘r’.

LEVELS OF POLITENESS

We need to add two further complications to the Japanese language, which cause confusion to unwary foreigners. The first is that there are many levels of politeness within the Japanese language which are very difficult to get right. A boss, for example, will use different words when asking a subordinate to do something than the subordinate will use to express acceptance of the task. A man will use different words from those used by a woman, and an adult will use different words when dealing with a child. The verb endings are different, and the words to describe oneself and the person one is addressing will vary. So there are several words for ‘I’, depending on the status of speaker and addressee. Watakushi is the most commonly used word for ‘I’ (or although even more commonly it is left out altogether and merely understood), but there is also watashi, ore, boku, ware and no doubt several others.

When addressing anybody, it is polite to give a Japanese the honorific suffix – san, as in Tanaka-san, (which means Mr, Mrs or Miss Tanaka) but there are several other suffixes that Japanese will use as the occasion requires. – Sama is even more polite that – san, but is only normally used ceremonially; then there’s – kun for people who are your juniors, – sensei for people who deserve particular respect (the word literally means ‘teacher’), and – chan for children. Westerners should stick to – san tacked on to the end of the surname: that way you can’t go wrong.

If your Japanese skills develop to the level where you can conduct conversations in the language, stick to the neutral polite forms: remember what we said about relationships and remember that the Japanese for a foreigner, gaijin, literally means an outsider. Try to avoid words that imply a particular relationship, whether upwards or downwards, with your listeners.

YES AND NO: NO AND YES

The second complication is the use of the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ give more difficulties in communications between Japanese and Westerners than any others. The reason is simple: to Japanese, ‘yes’ does not necessarily mean ‘yes’, and ‘no’ very rarely means ‘no’.

When yes doesn’t mean yes

The Japanese word you will find in the dictionary as meaning ‘yes’ is hai. But hai does not really mean ‘yes’. It means, ‘I have heard you, I have understood you, and I am now thinking of a reply’. So if a Japanese says hai in response to your question, ‘Will you place an order for one million widgets at $10 each?’ he does not mean that he has solved your factory’s overproduction problems with one word. He has merely heard your question, and is probably thinking of a way to say ‘no’ without causing you to lose face. Even if he uses the word ‘yes’ in English, you must remember that his dictionary also says that the English for hai is ‘yes’, and he is merely using your language to indicate that he has heard, understood and is thinking of a reply. As Geert Hofstede points out, ‘the word “yes” should not necessarily be seen as an approval, but as a maintenance of the communication line’.

I was told by one wise Japanese that the exact equivalent of hai is ‘uh-huh’. ‘Uh-huh’ signifies nothing more that than you are still listening, and depending on the expression used can vary from absolute agreement to complete scepticism. Hai is very similar. So never assume that you have agreement when you hear the word ‘yes’ in discussion with a Japanese. If you need to be reassured that there is agreement, then ask a follow-up question, which requires an answer other than ‘yes’.

‘Will you deliver this by tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what time tomorrow shall I expect you?’

This will prompt either a ‘Sorry, I cannot do it tomorrow’ or a ‘Half past three’, and then you will know what the ‘yes’ really meant.

The absence of no

The Japanese for ‘no’ is iie. But you will never hear this word used, except late at night in a bar when a Japanese reveller is being offered his umpteenth beer or whisky by his host, and has to admit that enough is enough. In this case, iie means, ‘I cannot possibly impose on any more of your kindness and hospitality. I won’t have another beer/whisky.’ The word for ‘no’ as in ‘No, I won’t buy a million of your lousy widgets’ does not exist. ‘No’ is a confrontation.

Learning how to identify when a Japanese is saying no is one of the most difficult of all cross-cultural skills to acquire. There is no hard and fast rule which will help you – it’s just a matter of experience. The Japanese phrase, Saa, muzukashii desu ne! (’Well. that’s very difficult’), usually spoken after a sharp intake of breath between clenched teeth, is a pretty sure sign that what you have asked for is impossible, but of course, it is not the done thing to admit that what has been requested cannot be done. So the usual first word used to say ‘no’ is, inevitably, hai. If it is followed by a sucking of teeth, then you know that the ‘yes’ means ‘no’. Another phrase that implies a strong negative is kangaete okimasu – literally, ‘I’ll think about it.’ When a Japanese hears kangaete okimasu, he concludes the cause is hopeless. When he says, in English, ‘I’ll think it over’, he is also stating as clearly as he can that the answer is no. But native English speakers are quite likely to keep on hoping when they hear that phrase.

My favourite ‘no’ is ‘You may be right’. ‘Yes, there was theoretically a chance that you could have been right, but actually you are totally wrong’ is what it really means.

The idiosyncrasies of English

When speaking English with Japanese people, indeed with any non-native English speakers, it is essential to remember that the English we speak at home is a very colloquial language, a very indirect language and a language full of things understood or implied but not actually spoken. English has two further idiosyncrasies in that native speakers use irony a great deal, and they use the negative in questions. Both these verbal quirks tend to baffle non-native speakers.

I remember one Japanese businessman who visited a British company on a day when the weather was terrible. It rained heavily all day and there was a strong wind to make it even more unpleasant. On reaching the company chairman’s office, having had to sprint through puddles in the car park while our ineffectual umbrellas were blown about in the wind, the visitor tried to straighten his tie and hair from the ravages of the elements. The chairman, business cards in hand, greeted his guest in the approved manner, and then began his small talk with the statement, ‘Isn’t it a lovely day today!’

This caused complete confusion for his visitor, whose English was rudimentary (although much better than the British chairman’s Japanese). In his opinion it was definitely not a lovely day, but then again, perhaps there had been a severe drought over the past few months in this part of Britain, so a torrential downpour could be interpreted as ‘a lovely day’. So was the answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?

Then again, because the question had been asked in the negative, in Japanese logic the answer should be either, ‘Yes, it isn’t a lovely day,’ or ‘No, it is a lovely day,’ – the exact opposite of the technically illogical English usage. So the Japanese visitor did not know what the answer should be, and even if he did, he did not know how to reply in English. In the end, he just mumbled and took a sip of tea, and the meeting stumbled on for another 20 minutes or so, before he was released and allowed to go about his business.

Keep it simple

Don’t use irony, don’t use negative questions, and while we are about it, don’t use idioms (’That’s a completely different kettle of fish’ once stopped a meeting for about half an hour’s surreal explanation about haddock, cups of tea and how the saying has nothing to do with either). Keep your English as simple and direct as it realistically can be. Don’t worry about vocabulary, although clearly jargon should be avoided. It’s the grammar that confuses more than the words.

BODY LANGUAGE

Japanese body language is another cause for confusion. A great deal of any message is conveyed by means of gestures, emphasis and posture, and within European cultures we are broadly able to interpret how well the words fit the actions, so that we can judge the sincerity of the message being given. Japanese, and indeed all East Asian cultures, tend to have far less extravagant body language than western, especially southern European, cultures. This makes it very hard for a Westerner to work out what the true feelings of his Japanese counterpart are, and often lead to confusion when there is an apparent contradiction between the words and the gestures.

Eye contact

There are a handful of rules to remember when using and watching body language. Firstly, avoid direct eye contact. In the West, we consider it a sign of honesty if a speaker looks us in the eye, but in Japan people are very uneasy about any direct eye contact, even if for a short while. When giving a presentation, for example, Japanese people tend to look at the slides or their notes rather than the speaker, and even in a small business meeting, this will tend to be the case. You will often notice that people have their eyes shut in a meeting: this is not because they have fallen asleep (although very occasionally it might be), but because they can thereby avoid direct eye contact. It is also worth noting that because Japanese body language is so contained, it is not really necessary to look at a speaker to work out whether or not he is being sincere. So Japanese don’t look at the speaker – they listen intently to the words, which can also be done more effectively with eyes shut.

Silence

Secondly, be aware of silence. Westerners are frightened by silence. In a business meeting, anything more than a couple of seconds’ silence is interpreted as a potential disaster. Somebody did not understand something, or somebody does not like what I’m saying: I’ve shocked them into silence. The Japanese do not work like that. They consider it a remarkable skill that Europeans can listen and think at the same time, thus eliminating the need for silent thinking time. Japanese will listen until you stop speaking, and then take time to consider their response.

The almost irresistible impulse for any Westerner is to fill the silence with words, any words. The trouble is that once you have said all that you wanted to say, anything you add just to fill a gap in the silence is likely to weaken your case rather than strengthen it. So if you’ve said all you want to say and it’s their turn to say something, keep quiet until they speak. It can be very difficult – ten seconds is a very long time to keep silent in a business meeting.

Your language or mine?

Language difficulties arise in dealing with any foreign culture, and with Japan the problems are no worse than with any other culture – nor indeed worse than foreigners encounter when dealing with the Brits. Remember the former German Chancellor Schmidt’s dictum, ‘When I am selling to you British, we will speak English, but when you are selling to me, dann müssen wir Deutsch sprechen.’ Never go into a business meeting without somebody who can speak Japanese it would be arrogant and impolite to do so. But equally, never assume that your own Japanese will be good enough to conclude a deal in the language: it won’t be.