In those long years, I had never seriously read any "how to make business in Japan" books. I have started reading some lately, and the impression is weird, to say the least. Take this one, "Japanese Business Culture and Practices - A Guide to Twenty-First Century Japanese Business". The author is an ex-professor of sociology. The co-author is seemingly, or used to be, well, much about nothing besides being Japanese. If nationality qualifies as a competence, then yes, he was, and I assume still is, Japanese, like others are engineers. In the dedication page, the author unleashes some venom to "the Department of Sociology, scarred by scandal, internal conflict, general backstabbing, false friends, and a disinterest in undergraduate education, has little to recommend it." A nice starter that made me think to send back the book to Amazon. But too late it was.
Anyway, hum, hum. I don't know if one should be qualified to write a book about doing business in Japan while being not fluent in Japanese. Or rather, one should be allowed, granted, one modifies the title with something like "how to do business in Japan from the point of view of someone not fluent enough or at all in Japanese so much that his vista is that of a non-Japanese speakers positively relying more than often on interpreters". You can see why such book would not sell.
Anyway. I wonder how much the author picked out from other look alike books to cram his own with a slew of bewildering bits about the dynamics of Japanese work and corporation. You get the standard mystifying and utterly useless dash of Japanese vocabulary like wa, honne, tatemae and the likes. You get bucho and amae sandwiched with Japanese eating etiquette, Japanese drinking etiquette, and another carload of etiquettes. This spreading of Japanese words to set the mystics is something that should be condemned by having the perpetrator gulp down 15 pieces of Otoro, sorry, fatty tuna, sushi in a row.?What does amae and bucho add to the comprehension besides the shroud of "Asian Mystery" that so much describes Japan in the Western blurb. You know, the kimono clad girl with a mobile on the ear, the ying and the yang of hightech and lovely traditions. The shroud of Asian Mystics, sticky as a spider web whose bite induces smiling slumbering, has been such a deja-vue yet compulsory means for the authors to state their mastery of the subject that it goes unnoticed. That is, again, granted you have not spent half of your life here, or more.
The end result of so many facts on the dynamics of work, life, human relations and the innards of corporation is that you get the description of a religious sect with Yoda at the top and tiny yodas around, mysteriously speaking, eating, keeping silent, belching, slumbering during meetings, being cryptic even in the toilet. You, the rude, coarse, boasting, arrogant, face-loosing, salvage rogue of a Westerner is going to meet cunning cuteness, intelligence at best, perfection which is Asian therefore perfect, etc. Once you read through, and it's a tremendously annoying exercise when you know more, the conclusion is a big : SO WHAT?
The only practical chapter I mostly agree with is the one on the absolute need to use the services of your own interpreter, not theirs.
I am still waiting to read a book starting from : what you want to achieve coming here doing business in Japan, and what are the local elements of the dynamic that will clash with your expectations, and what can be done despite differences to try and meet your goals.
Nobody I know or I have read about would state for instance something like : "conceptual talk is absolutely cryptic and meaningless for most Japanese (businessmen, the girl that brings tea, the boss, the bucho, the kids, housewives and pets). Smear your presentations - the PowerPoint things - with examples after examples. Use abundantly flow charts with pretty iconic pictures, even if you don't see where there is a flow in the abstract. Don't tale for granted that things being different here and there is unnecessary to stress. It is."
Also, don't expect your standard interpreter to be aware of these facts and to help you in anyway reach your goals, or at least try and reach those. So the next book to write, granted it is not here would be something like "An objectives achievement based guide to doing business in Japan". And no amae, no wa, nor even fatty tuna would appear in it.
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