“In Japan, people are very respectful of the hierarchy and give it a lot of importance, especially when sharing tasks and responsibilities. One day I asked a question to a French colleague in Japan who was not the person in charge of the topic (but was following anyway). His boss was really upset with me because he did not understand I did not ask him directly. he felt like he was useless. on my side, I just wanted to avoid annoying him for a simple question his subordinate could easily answer.”
“In Spain, people are more reactive than people from other countries, we concentrate on the activity and to provide a solution… but then you have people from Germany or Japan, that they concentrate on the process, and what’s the impact on the normative”
“In Japan when people said Hai, it meant they heard me but not really an agreement.”
“(…) A skill to express your opinions at the same time showing carefully your sympathy with others’ feelings. To understand that many Japanese people regard not saying their opinions directly as kind of polite behaviour.”
“From what I learned, people in Japan are used to work in a “cooperation basis”, in which they split the job with several colleagues and after it is done, everyone revises others’ work. Finally the boss revises the full work.”
“Their sense of perfection in Japan is very high, and they can invest a huge time in some details.”
“When working in a hotel, we had a Japanese group of people and we the boss complained because he had a lower floor than his employees. We learnt then that we needed to allocate the rooms for Japanese on a hierarchical level.”
“During company presentation to a Japanese company, the audience doesn’t participate actively, they seemed to be bored. The speaker thought his presentation was not interesting but… afterwards the Japanese asked a lot of very precise questions which made the speaker very confused. ”
“When I used to work for Renault, we worked with Japanese Team from Nissan on a common plant to be built in India. A top-down decision was taken and with French colleagues we realized it was not adapted to our project context. Then we proposed a position paper to challenge the decision. For our Japanese colleagues, that was just impossible to re-challenge a decision…”