“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…”
“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, having my boss telling me what to do/not to do through other people and not talking to me directly, even if we had lunch together he preferred to talk about weather or food rather than explaining clearly what he wanted me to do/improve.”
“Japanese workers are deferential to the point where it inhibits creativity.”
“Japanese people give business card in a very ceremonial way. The first time we may be a bit surprised.”