Jason Devitt

One night in Tokyo I made a pilgrimage to the New York Bar on the top floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel, where Bill Murray drank away the night in Lost In Translation. For fans of the movie, the bar is smaller than you expect, there’s a cover charge, and a lot of elderly Japanese businessmen chatting awkwardly to very young companions. But there are panoramic views of Tokyo, which doesn’t have many 52-storey buildings, and there really is a gaijin jazz band. I was hoping for Midnight at the Oasis, but settled for My Funny Valentine.

At the time I was working for a Japanese company, and the movie struck a chord. Not the mid-life crisis or the sexual frustration, but the sense of isolation in a land where every sign and gesture is strange.

I had always thought of doing business in a foreign language as an expensive but straightforward encoding/decoding problem: English to X, X to English. But it’s not. The meaning of many English words is specific to western culture. Most of the time we don’t even notice, because western culture is so ubiquitous. But when the culture is very different, mere translation is not enough. Even the simplest words can be misunderstood. For example, the word Yes.

There are at least three different ways to misunderstand the word Yes in Japan; that is to say, three that I have learned so far. I call them The Yes That Means I Am Listening, The Yes That Isn’t There, and The Yes That Means No.

The Yes That Means I Am Listening

In an American meeting, when you are speaking and everyone else is nodding their head and saying yes it means that they agree with you. If they don’t agree with you, they either say so, or they say nothing at all. In a Japanese meeting, when you speak everyone else listens, whether they agree with you or not. And they are very attentive. To show how attentive they are, and how much they appreciate you making the effort to speak to them, they nod their heads and say yes.

Oops. You start skipping parts of your presentation, because they clearly understand and agree. They grow confused, but are too embarrassed to say so; instead they listen even more attentively, and say yes. You think the meeting is going brilliantly, and then … a question that doesn’t make sense if they agree with you, a challenge on a basic issue, or perhaps they just get weary of you and call a halt. And you have no idea what happened. They said yes, didn’t they?

The Yes That Isn’t There

Or, The Absence Of No. The Japanese hate to say No, and hate to hear it. To be denied anything is to lose face; better not to ask at all. But if you must ask, you do not do so directly. You raise the issue briefly in an unrelated meeting, or over lunch, or on the golf course. You build consensus. You are sure that the answer is going to be yes before you explicitly make the request. The meeting where that actually happens is a formality, and everyone knows it. Or ought to. It’s like a cannibal barbecue: if you don’t know who’s for dinner, it’s probably you.

Enter the gaijin. You ask questions in meetings and you usually expect answers. When you don’t hear a no, you either assume a yes or assume that a yes is still possible. So you keep rephrasing the question until your exasperated Japanese host refuses to talk about the subject any further. If they invite you back to talk more, you think that’s a good thing. Well, maybe. But whether the answer is yes or no, the only purpose of that second meeting is to communicate it. The decision has been made, and you weren’t there. What’s for dinner again?

The Yes That Means No 

At the end of a disappointing sales call, you say to a Japanese buyer "You don’t want to buy our product, do you?" She says "Yes," and you get very excited. But nothing comes of it, and you feel deceived.

More a matter of grammar than culture, perhaps. In English, the Japanese or her interpreter should have said "No, I don’t" or just "No", because the word No should always be paired with a negative statement. But in Japanese, the literal response is "Yes, I don’t" or just "Yes." It takes an experienced interpreter or translation software of rare discrimination - backed by a very expensive errors & omissions policy - to take the Japanese word for Yes and render it as the English word No.

If it was just grammar, this wouldn’t be much of a problem. The correct meaning would be clear from the context. But culture compounds the error. Perhaps you heard The Yes That Means I Am Listening, or The Yes That Wasn’t There, so you are already confused. Having made it clear in her own way that the answer is no, the Japanese buyer isn’t interested in correcting your stupid mistake. She may not even realize that you didn’t understand her, thinking that your happy tone at the end of the call was a professional courtesy, a reminder that it’s only business.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive account of what can go wrong when English-speaking people open their mouths in Tokyo, just a sketch of the doubt and confusion that can surround a single, short, simple word like Yes.

Never go to a meeting without a skilled interpreter, someone intimately familiar with both cultures. Spend time with that person, and get them familiar with your industry, so that they understand the terms of art. Do not rely on the interpreter provided by your hosts. Do not tolerate any paraphrasing of your words or what your host says. And do not take Yes for an answer.

For an in-depth account of the potential for cultural misunderstanding between Japanese and Americans, I recommend Haru Yamada’s Different Games, Different Rules.