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SUMMARIZING a national Survey of Japanese language instruction in the United States, Eleanor Jorden states that “for the first time in history, a language unrelated to English, a ‘truly foreign language,’ has been mainstreamed in the American system of education. That language is, of course, Japanese” (177). Today, nobody can deny that Japan is one of the most important allies and trading partners for the United States. At institutions of higher education across the country, there is ever-growing interest in Japanese language and culture.
This Japanese boom includes not just students interested in Japanese literature and arts but also students interested in business. According to the Japan Foundation's 1995 worldwide survey of Japanese language education, business is at the top of the list of interests among students of Japanese. This trend was also observed in a survey conducted in the United States by the National Foreign Language Center (Jorden). 1 The need for instruction in business Japanese is clearly visible in today's globalized marketplace. Thus it is fair to say that we are facing a new challenge in course offerings in Japanese: how to cope with diversification in the purpose of study, specifically in business Japanese Courses. Most literature or linguistics instructors in language departments have no training in business, yet they face student demand for business Japanese. Are we qualified to teach business Japanese courses? If so, what should we teach in such courses? What follows is a case study of the business Japanese program for intermediate and advanced students at the University of Utah. 2
The mention of business Japanese brings to mind business-related technical vocabularies, fixed expressions, business protocols, and grammar useful in various business situations Such as making appointments and telephone calls. There are several textbooks that target those aspects of business Japanese. Initially, we tested those textbooks in our business Japanese classes, but they were not successful, and the majority of students were not satisfied with them. Most of the specialized technical vocabularies and expressions in the textbooks have no relevance to students who are not yet in business situations. Most of our students do not have a clear picture regarding what field they will go into after finishing their program. They may go into banking, service industries, machine manufacturing, sales, or other fields, each of which has its own specialized vocabulary. They do not know if they will get a job related to Japan (although they optimistically think that taking business Japanese will increase their chances of getting such a job). When students cannot find any relevance or meaningfulness in what they are doing, there is no motivation for learning, and as a result, efficient learning does not occur.
Instead of simply emphasizing specialized technical vocabularies and expressions, we decided to go back to our language department mission: to educate students so that they can function effectively in a contemporary global environment and so that they acquire a critical and comprehensive understanding of diverse cultures. We firmly believe our business Japanese courses should comply with this mission. To this end, we have decided to develop our own materials using the following principles (see Azuma, Ogawa, and Nishikage):
We have included the following topics: Japanese government (e.g., political parties, elections, government regulations), industrial structure (e.g., keiretsu ‘affiliated firms,’ restructuring), company organization (e.g., seniority systems, lifetime employment, hiring, women in business), Japanese business customs (e.g., consensus building, principles of trust, work time), communication strategies (e.g., honne ‘real intention’ and tatemae ‘theory and practice,’ membership, speech style, politeness strategies). We think that teaching socially acceptable communication strategies is a crucial element of business Japanese. E. T. Hall claims that cultures can be classified as “high context” or “low context,” where context is the amount of information a speaker and a hearer share or assume. He classifies Japan as a high-context culture and the United States as a low-context culture. In a high-context culture such as Japan, the amount of information a speaker and a hearer share or assume is large, and thus the amount of information explicitly transmitted is small. This is exactly opposite in a low-context culture. This inverse relation is crucial when Americans deal with Japanese in a business setting. The difference is reflected in areas such as personal relationships, belief in explicit communication, law, contracts, reliance on verbal communication, and face-saving strategies.
One of our frustrations with business Japanese has been the scarcity of materials for teaching culturally acceptable business communication strategies, not just technical vocabularies and superficial etiquette. Although language carries referential and affective messages, most textbooks emphasize the comprehension and production of the referential message, focusing on vocabulary, kanji, grammar, and other linguistic knowledge. Such textbooks may teach students to understand or compose sentences or short paragraphs that are grammatically correct, but they fail to help students learn to consider the status of the addressee.
The crucial area that has been left out in the development of these materials is the addressee—how he or she feels when confronted with the particular way the speaker frames communicative goals, the affective message a certain sentence pattern may carry, and so on. Although sociolinguists working in the field of speech accommodation studies have widely researched the role of the addressee in message construction (e.g., Giles, Coupland, and Coupland), the application of various findings to material development has not been as swift as one would wish. 3 In analyzing the needs of Americans conducting business in Japan, Carl Falsgraf, Noriko Fujii, and Hiroko Kataoka point out that one necessary yet unaddressed task is to develop materials and methods to teach students how to appreciate this affective message.
Although it is difficult to differentiate honne from tatemae , even for native speakers of Japanese, many Americans working for Japanese companies in Japan report that understanding honne and tatemae is crucial to their business success. According to Falsgraf, Fujii, and Kataoka, most Americans tend to take tatemae at face value and fail to appreciate the underlying honne. And this oversight seems to happen often. Realizing that Japanese do not always mean what they say, Americans sometimes conclude that Japanese are sneaky and unreliable. The concepts of honne and tatemae seem to prevail in various speech acts just as the concepts of uchi ‘inside’ and soto ‘outside’ do in Japanese culture. Why do Japanese use honne and tatemae so frequently? What is the purpose of using honne and tatemae in communication? Politeness strategy, studied in the field of sociolinguistics (see, e.g., Brown and Levinson) explains.
For example, rejection strategy seems quite different in the United States. The following is an American businessman's comment on a Japanese rejection strategy.
If we proposed a design that they didn't like or asked them for something, instead of saying that they didn't like it or couldn't do it, they would say, “We will study it.” That was their polite way of saying no to us, but we really thought they would study it and get back to us.
Instead of boldly expressing a lack of interest in the proposed design ( honne ), the Japanese respond that they will study it ( tatemae ). For a native speaker of Japanese this comment is enough to impart a negative message (i.e., rejection or refusal), but not for Americans. The Japanese idea of being polite and considerate to others is to avoid making any explicit negative statement that may harm the listener's “positive face” (i.e., desire to be liked by others), and the Japanese in this example frame their politeness strategy in tatemae. To resolve conflict, the Japanese use an avoidance strategy (avoidance of any explicitly negative statement), while Americans use a confrontation strategy. This difference may lead to serious misunderstandings if both parties are not well informed.
Thus our ultimate goal is not just to teach specialized vocabularies and grammar but to also go beyond those aspects, to encourage students to acquire culturally appropriate communication strategies that might be quite different from their own. Those strategies include expressing rejection, disagreement, complaint, apology, and anger; making a suggestion; shifting the topic; listening (e.g., aizuchi ‘back-channel’ responses); and offering and responding to compliments.
Having appropriate teaching materials for business Japanese courses is not enough to ensure successful instruction. Obviously interested instructors who feel comfortable teaching these courses are also needed. Because business Japanese is fairly new in many departments, instructors often have neither experience nor training in teaching such courses. The best way to remedy the situation is to collaborate with faculty members in the language department, elsewhere in the university, or at other universities who share the same concern. The language department I belong to has been offering business language courses in German and Spanish, and faculty members who teach these courses have to a certain extent helped me prepare to teach business Japanese. However, as all of us know, Japanese is in many ways different from commonly taught Indo-European languages, and it is crucial to meet others who teach Japanese (and other Asian languages) to discuss various issues specific to Japanese (and other Asian languages).
It is also useful to get together with other Japanese language instructors from nearby universities or to attend workshops or conferences that focus on business Japanese. Fortunately, Utah has two major centers that support development of business Japanese courses: the Brigham Young University (BYU)-University of Utah Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) program and the US-Japan Center of Utah, which is part of the federally funded US-Japan Industry and Technology Management program. 4 These two centers have been interested in developing business Japanese in our language program. One of the centers' major goals is to send qualified students abroad as interns. This goal harmonizes well with the aims of our language program. Instruction should not be confined to the classroom; students should be given every opportunity to increase their proficiency in the target language and their understanding of the target culture in the target country. Such training becomes especially important in an increasingly global society.
To collaborate with other instructors in Japanese (and in other Asian languages) across the country, we began hosting an annual Asian business language workshop in 1995. The workshop, which lasts three days, is designed to enhance teaching skills in Asian business language courses and knowledge of international business. This year's workshop is intended for university and college professors and instructors of Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese. Presenters include instructors from language departments, faculty members from business schools, and managers from companies that conduct business with Asian countries. The workshop, sponsored by the BYU-University of Utah CIBER and the US-Japan Center of Utah, has been an effective way for instructors to share methods and materials and to learn from one another. Thanks to the sponsoring centers, participants will receive financial assistance to attend the workshop. I encourage Asian language instructors to participate.
Since the purpose of language is communication, it is essential to maximize the opportunity for students to use their target language in contexts other than the classroom. Students of business Japanese should have the opportunity to go to Japan and to use the language in a business setting. To this end, we have been offering internships to students who complete requirements for a minor in Japanese, take two quarters of business Japanese, and pass written and oral exams. As a part of the US-Japan Center of Utah program, we annually send about thirty students to companies in Japan for three to six months. Each host company provides housing and a monthly stipend to students. In exchange, company employees have an opportunity to learn ways of thinking different from their own, to internationalize themselves and their companies, and to build networks for the future. This internship program has been so successful that two Japanese government agencies, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO), have decided to recruit Japanese companies to host American interns. A representative of JETRO recently informed me that there are far more host companies than American applicants. Generally, it takes a tremendous amount of time, energy, and commitment (and often face-to-face personal relationships) to build up an internship program with Japanese host companies. The effort by JETRO and MITI is good news to universities that do not have internship programs, for it presents a great opportunity to business Japanese programs.
Let me conclude by noting an anecdote that supports the need for internships. At the end of his internship, an American student commented to a group of Japanese businessmen, “The English language may be an international language in the sense that it can be accepted almost everywhere in the world as a means of communication. However, since the day I arrived at my Japanese office in a hosting company, I have started realizing that the American way of thinking is not internationally accepted like the English language.” The student may have accepted this idea intellectually before he came to Japan, but he did not fully understand it until he started working with Japanese colleagues.
Increasing numbers of students have expressed their desire to learn Japanese for careers in business. Yet a Japanese business executive has stated that although he would not be surprised to find Japanese businessmen speaking English in New York, he would be very surprised to see American businessmen speaking Japanese in Tokyo. Given the present situation, it is imperative to provide our students, the future leaders of the United States, with strong communicative language skills as well as comprehensive knowledge of Japan. This need is especially urgent in this global era. Business Japanese courses will play an important role in meeting this need while also fulfilling the language department's mission. Such courses will help students realize that some seemingly self-evident notions and principles may not be acceptable in other cultures and help them expand their intellectual horizons and better understand their own culture.
The author is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Head of the Japanese sector in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Utah. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 6—8 June 1996, in San Diego, California.
1 According to Jorden, the most important focus of interest in Japan among students is business (32.5%), followed by culture (22.6%). Expectations of future employment also lie in business, by far the most commonly expected vocation (48.7%), followed by government (18.4%).
2 At the University of Utah, business Japanese courses are offered to students who have finished two years of Japanese language.
3 Several helpful reference books including Nihongo Notes (Mizutani and Mizutani) and Japanese Cultural Encounters (Kataoka) have been published. However, they do not contain extended authentic Japanese texts that students can study.
4 The federally funded program includes twelve university centers created to prepare American scientists, engineers, managers, and students to function effectively in Japanese business culture.
Azuma, Shoji, Kunihiko Ogawa, and Hiroko Nishikage. Nihon no keizai to shyakai o yomu/Readings on Japanese Business and Society . Tokyo: Kenkyuu-shya, 1995.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephene C. Levinson. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
FaIsgraf, Carl, Noriko Fujii, and Hiroko Kataoka. “English Speakers in Japanese Work Environments.” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 27 (1993): 177-203.
Giles, Howard, Nikolas Coupland, and Janet Coupland. Contexts of Accommodation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
Hall, E. T. Beyond Culture. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1976.
Japan Foundation. Survey Report on Japanese-Language Education Abroad, 1993. Tokyo: Ministry of Finance, 1995.
Jorden, Eleanor. Japanese Language Instruction in the United States: Resources, Practice, and Investment Strategy. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1991.
Kataoka, Hiroko. Japanese Cultural Encounters. Lincolnwood: Passport, 1990.
Mill, David. Rev. of Advanced Japanese , by Yoshiko Higurashi. Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 25 (1991): 285–93.
Mizutani, Osamu,and Nobuko Mizutani. Nihongo Notes. Tokyo: Japan Times, 1990.
National Foreign Language Center. A Framework for Introductory Japanese Language Curricula in American High Schools and Colleges. Washington: Natl. Foreign Lang. Center, 1993.
© 1997 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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