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Review focus: business enquiries, language problems, foreign-language, customary, economic factors, cultural, competition, writen correspondence
Asian Business Code Words Index NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company Asian Business Strategy & Street Intelligence Ezine
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One of the most common complaints about Japanese companies is that they often fail to answer business inquiries or request for information. There are, or course, two sides to the story. Many Japanese companies receive hundreds of letters every week from all over the world. Some of the inquiries are from large, reputable firms. Others are from small companies trying to get started in business - ranging from retail shops to private individuals. The letters from abroad come in many different languages, including such lesser known ones as Urdu, Swahili, Tagalog, and Tamil. Imagine, if you will, how many American, British, or French companies that receive dozens of letters from unknown sources, frequently in rare languages, would bother to do anything with them. But over and above this consideration, there are several reasons why written inquiries to Japanese companies are often not answered. The individual Japanese section or department manager does not have a secretary or even a "pool" typist to take care of correspondence. Inquiries coming from abroad, unless they are addressed to a specific individual in a section or department, most likely go to the General Affairs Department, where they tend to end up in the hands of young employees who are still undergoing on-the-job training. They generally do not read English very well, much less other foreign languages, and may or may not spend hours with a foreign-language dictionary trying to decipher what the letters say. Most letters to Japanese companies do not go beyond this point. Besides this, it is not customary for Japanese companies to provide information about their products or services to unknown outsiders (except for the annual reports, catalogs, or flyers available on special occasions). The reaction tend to be, "Who wants to know and why?" Another factor that works against Japanese companies "automatically" answering inquiries from unknown parties is that individual managers, and certainly not clerks, generally do not have the authority to provide information or make offers on their own. Japanese managers can either say no or do nothing - which is the same thing, especially if they do not refer the request or proposition to someone else. But they cannot expose the company or commit the company to anything by themselves. The tendency of Japanese companies to be close-mouthed and even secretive about their business is a result of several cultural and economic factors. Traditionally, Japanese society has been closed - made up of exclusive groups and groups within groups. Each one is very sensitive about its existence, responsibilities, and privileges. They are basically hostile to all other groups and to some degree in competition with them. This system, and the ethics responsible for its development, precludes the free and open exchange of information between groups, since the primary motivation is to protect one's own group and outdo all others. This attitude and practice still prevails to a formidable degree in Japan's business world. Of course there are exceptions, since more than 4,000 trading companies in Japan engage primarily in international business, and a significant percentage of the country's major manufacturers have their own export departments. But the fact remains that the Japanese do not conduct very much of their business through written correspondence. Their system gives precedence to and often makes mandatory the face-to-face meeting and the development of a personal relationship before any business transpires.
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Boye Lafayette de Mente is one of our regular monthly columnists at the 
| This month's column is excerpted from Japanese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, by Boye Lafayette De Mente available from NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company |
© Boye Lafayette De Mente & the Asia Pacific Management Forum 2000
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