Search for a Method

Over the past two weeks, we have been a little stressed out by some conflict we’ve been having with our boss. To be honest, the situation has been going on since we arrived here, but we finally decided that we were going to confront it about two weeks ago and we finally did on Monday. When talking to our boss - telling her what we thought was wrong and why we thought it was wrong - rather than responding to our points logically she quickly digressed to the point of tears at which point she stood up, said “I’ll have to think about it,” and walked out of the room. The next day we found out that she had been so upset that she hadn’t even realized that we were asking for something, she simply thought that we were attacking her as a manager. Even worse, she told Anna when I wasn’t even there that I had taken a bad attitude with her, acting like I was the boss and not her.

Naturally, while I am glad that we received what we asked for, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with her misinterpretation of my intentions all week. It wasn’t until today, when I had a fascinating conversation with some of my more advanced students about a recent seminar they attended, that I realized how much of a cultural clash I had had at the beginning of the week. The seminar these students attended yesterday was an international business course, focusing on cultural differences that affect business. It was apparently taught by an American and a Canadian, both of whom are proficient in Japanese since they’ve been living in Japan for well over 10 years. Using both Japanese and English, they made fun of idiosyncrasies of both Western and Japanese business.

What really caught my attention about this seminar, was the primary separation the teachers used to compare a Japanese approach to a Western approach. Essentially, they called the Japanese approach the Confucian method, with a strong master-disciple relationship taking precedence over everything else, while they called the Western approach the Socratic method, where dialogue and discussion are more important than any formal relationships. In this way, they explained why the Japanese are much more quick to agree that a white board is black if their boss says it is, and why our students are always hesitant to tell us what they want in the classroom.

Now, I’m not saying that this distinction is either historically or philosophically sound, but it really made me realize that I had been forgetting (or ignoring) everything that I knew about Japanese culture in my understanding of our boss’s reaction earlier this week. Her cultural predispositions, particularly those that indicated to her that by expressing our unhappiness we were essentially attacking her as a person and disrespecting her as a boss, can be fit with relatively little distortion into the lessons learned by my students at yesterday’s seminars. Maybe I assumed that since she’s worked with gaijin for so long she can see the world like we do. If so, I was dead wrong. Our understanding of society, values, and in turn the entire world, is shaped by cultural trappings we begin accumulating probably before we can even speak. While some people may be able to adapt very well to other cultures, other methods of thought, and other ways of life, they’ll never escape the ones that made them who they are. Despite our boss’s experience with Westerners she still acted Japanese, and despite my knowledge of Japanese culture, I still acted American.  I guess, then, that the real purpose of studying other cultures or languages is not necessarily to ever learn to think exactly like someone else, but to be able to understand someone else’s approach through our own gaze. Of course, this means that we we’ll never really be able to escape cultural differences completely. Hopefully, it does mean that in the next few months we’ll learn to reduce such cultural “clashes” into cultural “bumps.”