It was then that I started to understand just how powerfully cultural differences influence the workplace. Different languag-es are an obvious workplace barrier, but different cultural values have a defining impact on the way people communicate, build relationships, make decisions, take risks, build teamwork and more. Although I once considered language the key to success in international relations, I now realize that foreign language skills are secondary to understanding culture.
When I showed up, at age twenty-two, at the Tokyo headquarters of Honda Motor Company on a fine September morning wearing a cream-colored dress-for-success suit and matching pumps, I could say in fluent Japanese, “I look forward to a successful work experience in Japan,” but I had no idea of what it would take to achieve that success. Even though I had long been interested in Japan and spoke reasonably good Japanese, I still made mistakes because I was deeply and fundamentally American in my way of thinking, my behavior and my understanding of the world. My mouth could form Japanese phrases, but I could not understand the values behind those words because nearly all my life had been spent in Columbus, Ohio, living among other Americans.
What I know now that I didn’t know then is that to succeed in another country, especially one as distinct as Japan, it is necessary to see one’s own culture as just one way of life and accept that other people will have a different—and equally valid—way of doing things. Perhaps these differences will be obvious—such as the way people speak or dress—but most of the key cultural differences will be invisible and therefore harder to understand.
As a consultant I have seen sophisticated and skillful American executives who fail to see that Japanese professionals have different cultural values and that these cultural issues matter. These are not casual, “isn’t-that-interesting”cultural details about kimonos or chopsticks. The cultural factors I’m talking about are ones that have a meaningful, success-or-failure impact on people’s daily work lives.
For example, one of the cultural topics most frequently mentioned by both Americans and Japanese in my training seminars is style of communication. There is a strong cultural tendency among many Japanese to pause frequently before speaking. Many Americans, especially in the business world, are uncomfortable with silence, so pausing and listening are not valued and practiced skills. Americans also tend to be highly verbal and direct while Japanese tend to utilize non-verbal communication. This culture gap has been well-documented by academics with far better credentials than mine, yet Americans consistently fail to notice this difference and also fail to utilize perhaps the easiest, most effective communication strategy available to them: stop talking and listen!
Failure to pay attention to these meaningful aspects of life in another country is what I have come to identify as cross-cultural laziness. It is the failure to learn about another country’s way of doing things and the failure to find ways to adjust one’s own behavior to that culture’s way of life. Cross-cultural laziness can take many forms and at its essence is the failure to respect another culture’s values.
Looking back over the twenty years since I showed up in that cream-colored suit at Honda’s Tokyo headquarters, I see that the story in this book is one about a smart, ambitious, well-meaning yet cross-culturally lazy American trying to make her way in the world beyond the borders of the U.S.A. It is a cautionary tale for young Americans who are about to start their own adventures.
Although many years have passed since that time, the most important lesson of the book—how to avoid being cross-culturally lazy—is more relevant today than ever before because America today is more dependent on other nations than ever before. The trend toward true globalization means that Americans need to develop strong partnerships with people from other cultures, integrate our strengths with those of other nations and share insight and information in a way that contributes to a more peaceful world. And the starting point of these relationships, whether they are between individual tourists or government officials, must be respect and a wish to understand the many cultural factors that exist between different countries in the world.
Being cross-culturally intelligent means not judging people as wrong or strange when they bow instead of shake hands. It means that you take the time to understand behaviors that feel odd or values that don’t match your own before making judgments. It means that you pay attention to everything—from what people choose for breakfast to the way people choose a spouse. You start with the obvious cultural differences and then work your way up to the invisible, deeply-held, hard-to-explain issues that impact daily life all over the world.
I hope that reading this book will be just a part of your own journey toward becoming a cross-culturally intelligent person. For more information on cultural issues and to see photos from my time in Japan, please visit my website:
Warmly, Laura Kriska
New York
Prologue
A WEEK AFTER GRADUATING from a small liberal arts college, I was working in an automobile factory in Ohio. In the weld shop I applied thick black sealer between small metal parts and then fused them together with a hydraulic press. On the assembly line I pressed penny-sized bits of adhesive into six precise points on the car’s metal frame before it moved down the line. In the paint shop I held tacky rags in both hands and had ten seconds to wipe the entire white body clean to prevent lint from messing up the color coat. Every day my feet throbbed inside a pair of steel-toed boots, and streaks of dirt marked the white cotton uniform with the red patch that said “Honda of America Mfg.” More than once I had to remind myself what I was doing here—that this was all part of my training to be the first American woman to work at Honda Motor’s Tokyo headquarters. When people heard I was on my way to work in Japan they always looked surprised until I told them where I came from. I was born in Tokyo during my parents’ assignment as missionaries, and my first words were Japanese. If they still didn’t believe that a fair-skinned redhead could have Asian roots I would offer to show them the bottoms of my feet where, I’d say jokingly, “it says ‘Made In Japan’.”
After two years in Tokyo we returned to Ohio and lived like the other families in Grandview Heights except that my mother filled the kitchen cupboards with colorful Kutani pottery, my father lugged around complicated Canon camera equipment on family vacations, and once a week we ate bowls of sticky white rice with chopsticks. Growing up, I used certain phrases and words without really knowing they were Japanese. “Tadaima” I’d say, walking in the door after a day at school. “Okaerinasai,” my mother would reply, welcoming me home. “Itadakimasu,” the whole family said before digging into a hot dinner; it was a convenient, one-word way to get around saying grace.
I took my first trip back to Japan with my family when I was sixteen. We traveled and visited Japanese friends that I knew only through the decorative New Year greeting cards they sent. Most of them, Takeuchis, Uchidas, and Abes, had known me as an infant. They treated us to elaborate feasts as we sat shoeless on the floors of their small homes.
At sixteen Japan excited me. My thirteen-year-old brother rebelled against this strange place where his knee-high tube socks and ragged baseball shirts didn’t fit the norm. On our first day in Tokyo my parents took us out to lunch at a restaurant on the top floor of a large department store. Without glancing at the menu my parents both ordered the deluxe sushi plate. My brother and I ordered spaghetti with meat sauce.
After the first few days my curiosity began to outweigh my uncertainty and the few words I knew helped me navigate my way. I discovered a sense of place, of coming home—the narrow streets, thin paper sliding doors, fresh-smelling tatami mats, and delicate cardboard lunch boxes folded into the shapes of flowers.
I started to study Japanese formally at Denison University after returning to the United States. The dark, curvy lines of the phonetic alphabet represented a secret code, and I practiced writing the forty-six symbols over and over, quizzing myself on any white space that presented