Most of what gets written about Japan and cross-cultural business splits into two camps. One is written by Japanese natives, often frustrated, arguing that some part of their own system is outdated and asking the country to modernise. The other is written by people who came to Japan from elsewhere and got held back by a regulation, a meeting, a hiring decision, a tax form. Both kinds of writing usually pick up a specific incident, a news story, a personal episode, a particular practice, and turn it into an argument that lands in the same place: here is what should change, and here is how to change it.
If you are reading this, the chances are that you have spent time with one or both of these genres recently. You may have a decision in front of you that depends on getting Japan right, or you may have just made one that did not go the way the contract suggested it would. The commentary you found did not help. There is a reason for that. What is missing from almost all of it is the time and care that should be put into studying why a system became the way it became, before deciding what to think about it.
Where the commentary fails
It is not that Japan is right or that the West is right. It is that “doing things better” is itself defined differently in different places, and most cross-cultural commentary is built on the assumption that the definition is shared. It is not. The systems and norms that work against you when you are operating in Japan were not somebody’s bad idea. They emerged from processes and traditions designed to serve the mass majority of a country that has only been open to the outside world for about a hundred and fifty years (and was, for most of that time, more concerned with how to do things its own way than with how those things looked from outside).
This isn’t nationalism or insularity. It’s how we, all humans, behave. Given a long enough stretch of time and enough cultural cohesion, every society develops a working answer to its own questions and stops asking whether other people would have answered differently. The Japanese answer is unusually well-defended because the country had unusually long to develop it. They also know that what they have been doing works. Not perfectly, not in every case, but enough that there is no obvious reason to discard it for someone else’s design.
What is not written in the contract
The clearest place I can show you what this means in practice is employment. Specifically, the part of employment that is hardest for foreign founders and executives in Japan: termination.
A founder I knew needed to replace a developer with someone considerably more qualified. The contract had a one-month termination notice, the same as the contracts he had signed in three other countries. He budgeted accordingly: thirty days, a clean handover, a new hire by the second month. He ended up stuck with the original developer for almost a year before being able to remove him from the company.
What he had missed, although nothing in the contract pointed him at it, was that the underlying law in Japan does not let an employer act on a one-month notice the way a contract in London or Berlin would let them. To terminate fairly, an employer must demonstrate that they have exhausted other options (performance improvement plans, reassignment, warnings) and that termination is a fair and necessary last resort. The contract is not the whole story. It is the part of the story written down. There is more, and the part that is not written tends to be the part that matters most.
The historical context, if you will permit me one paragraph of it, is the post-war rebuilding economy. Companies were expected to honour a code that included a job for life so that everyone could focus on building the country together. Losing the war had a detrimental effect not only on the economy but on the population’s psyche, and one of the answers to that was a labour system designed for stability over fluidity. Younger workers in Japan today no longer expect a job for life, and the gig economy is reshaping things, although the legal systems, the social welfare arrangements and the common perception take a long time to change. There are still over six million people living in Japan who experienced the Second World War first-hand. The time it takes to update such a critical component of social fabric, takes time.
This issue used to bother me a lot. I went looking, for years, for the clear quantifiable advantage of the Japanese system, the kind of advantage that would make the trade-off easy to see in a spreadsheet, and I could not find it. What I came to instead was something less satisfying and more useful. Given the complex circumstances that followed the chaos of war, this system worked. I am not saying it is better than other systems, and I am not saying it should not be updated. I am saying that I understand why it is what it is, which is a different position from defending it, and a precondition for any decision worth making inside it.
More than conflict avoidance
The same shape of argument applies to the communication. Many writers have addressed 本音と建前 (honne to tatemae, the distinction between what one privately thinks and what one publicly presents), and almost all of those analyses settle on conflict avoidance as the explanation. Conflict avoidance is part of it. But it is not the whole story, and reducing it to that misses the part that is most useful to a senior outsider trying to operate inside it.
In my experience, 本音と建前 is one of the most sophisticated communication modes in Japan. It is used, when it is used well, to signal to the other person where you want to take the conversation before any emotion or strong enquiries are placed. It can be a convenient way to bury a difficult issue, although it is at least as often a way to make a difficult conversation efficient and respectful.
The kind of move it allows is hard to render in English. Something close to: “I trust you and I want to do business with you. There are things outside my control, and rather than spend our energy on the issue preventing us from working together right now, let’s focus on building the relationship and look for another opportunity later.” You are not saying yes or no to the immediate problem (although you really mean no), and you are saying yes to building something that lasts. In English, the same conversation is much harder to have. You are expected to say no first, then explain why not, and by the time the explanation lands, the mood of the conversation has already shifted.
The same architecture shows up in meetings. A typical Japanese business meeting involves more attendees than its Western equivalent and takes longer to conclude. One reading of this is that the room lacks the ability to think critically, that people are uncomfortable discussing strategy on its merits with constructive criticism, and I should be honest that this is a fair reading. I consider it to be one of the biggest problems in Japanese society. Another reading is that the purpose of the meeting is to set the tone of the general direction of the conversation and make sure everyone’s expectations are more or less aligned. Sharp, critical, to-the-point comments can be shared between individuals, in private, before or after the meeting. The meeting agenda does not include sharing of honne. Both readings are true at once, and any executive operating inside this architecture has to hold them both.
Where I am writing from
I am bi-racial, with roughly equal time spent in Japan and Europe (mostly in the UK), which means I have watched both the Japanese expat in London who cannot understand why the team meeting feels combative, and the Western executive in Tokyo who feels excluded and misunderstood three weeks into a Japan posting. For me, it is a continuous personal challenge rather than a settled position. Most people I meet in Japan still assume, on first encounter, that I do not speak Japanese, although that is changing as more non-Japanese nationals speak it fluently. Once I do speak it, the people I meet tend to default to one of two assumptions: that I think like a Japanese person, or, much less often, that I am a Western mind that happens to speak Japanese well. I am neither. The friction lives in that gap, and it is the same gap most foreign executives in Japan find themselves in without the language to name it.
What you can take into your next decision
The regulations and social norms that work against you, in Japan or anywhere else, are not random legislature or trends that became the norm. They always have social context. When you hire a Japanese employee and the relationship is not working, and you reach for a one-month notice, the part of the picture you are missing is not in the contract. Some of it is in the law that no other country’s contracts cite. Some of it is in the design choice, visible everywhere in Japanese institutional life, to avoid direct confrontation and outright conflict where another route is available.
The most useful thing I can offer, having sat on both sides of this, is that the employee you are trying to let go isn’t trying to make it difficult for you. They are, often, merely exercising what they believe to be their right, derived from the norm in the society they have grown up inside. The same is true of the supplier who will not give you a straight answer, the regulator who keeps asking you for one more document, the senior partner who makes the decision in a private room rather than the meeting. They are not the obstacle. The architecture around them is, although that architecture has its own coherence and its own reasons for existing.
I am still not a huge fan of every part of this. I am, however, much more impartial to it than I used to be. Understanding is not the same as agreement, and impartiality is not the same as endorsement. They are, both of them, the cost of doing serious work inside someone else’s social fabric, and the precondition for any decision in that fabric being honest. How each culture defines “doing things better” is different. No decision made in another culture starts honestly until it begins from there.
