Cross-cultural experience in Japan

East Meets West:
My Cross-Cultural Dialogue with Harumi Kimura
Anna Mindess, MA, CSC, SC:L, California

A woman announces her engagement to a mixed group of Deaf and hearing friends. While the hearing friends murmur general comments of congratulations, the Deaf friends bombard the engaged woman with a string of pointed questions such as “How did you get to know each other?” “Who proposed?” “What did he say?” Although this may sound like a familiar instance of “straight talk” in American Deaf culture, it is, in fact, an example of Deaf/hearing politeness differences in Japan.
My fascination with intercultural communication and its application to Deaf/hearing interactions has spanned twenty years and resulted in two books. Consequently, I was thrilled to have the chance to visit Tokyo earlier this year and engage in some intriguing cross-cultural dialogues.

When I found out I was going to Japan, I contacted a Japanese man whom I had first met after a presentation I had made at Deaf Way2. Mr. Takeshi Sunada is Deaf and heads an interpreter training program at a college in Tokyo. Because of our mutual interest in cultural differences, Mr. Sunada was kind enough to organize a few lectures for me in Tokyo. I was especially looking forward to the last event, a public dialogue with a Deaf woman, Harumi Kimura. Ms. Kimura, who is from a Deaf family, is an instructor of JSL and also works signing the news on a local television station. She shares her thoughts about Deaf culture on a website that is translated into English by a group of dedicated Red Cross volunteers. It is entitled “Deaf and/or Japanese: My Thoughts on the Language, Culture and Education of the Deaf” and can be found at
http://deaf.cocolog-nifty.com/english/

I am a big fan of Ms. Kimura’s website. I read it faithfully for months before my trip, and was amazed at the many parallels between Deaf/hearing cultural differences in Japan and the United States. Some of the stories she relates on her website, such as the one in the opening paragraph of this article, point up the contrast between Deaf people’s more direct way of communicating compared to hearing people’s more indirect style. She also examines how Japanese hearing people are more likely to speak in vague terms about a planned meeting than Japanese Deaf people. The Deaf way tends to reconfirm the particulars of the meeting, such as the exact time, specific place and details such as which door will be left unlocked.
After reading these stories and realizing that we have a common fascination with the contrasts between typical Deaf and hearing approaches, I was very eager to meet Ms. Kimura in-person. My excitement was somewhat tempered by the fact that our first meeting would take place in front of an auditorium filled with 100 onlookers and that we would be exchanging observations with the help of a half dozen interpreters.

The big night of our on-stage dialogue arrived, and there I was sharing bento boxes at Setagaya Fukushi Professional School with the 6 interpreters who were needed to make the evening’s event possible (2 JSL interpreters for Ms. Kimura and Mr. Sunada, 2 JSL interpreters for the audience and 2 spoken Japanese/English interpreters for me). Ms. Kimura was running a bit late as she had just finished signing a television news broadcast. She finally hurried in and scanned the room to locate the person she would be sharing the stage with that night. When she saw me she signed, with some surprise, “ It’s YOU? Hmmm, when I found out an American was coming here, I imagined a very LARGE person, but you are tiny, just like Japanese women!” Then she quickly apologized, and wondered if I had found her remark rude. “Not at all”, I replied with a smile, “I feel quite at home now.”

We were quickly ushered onto the stage in front of the packed, expectant audience of interpreting students and members of the Deaf community. The next two hours sped by as Ms. Kimura and I took turns in responding to a series of questions that had been agreed upon previously. Mr. Sunada was kind enough to act as moderator. At the end, we opened it up to questions and comments from the audience.

We began by introducing ourselves and relating how we became interested in cultural differences. I explained that in my early years as an interpreter I noticed that certain interactions between my Deaf and hearing clients would often lead them to make misjudgments about each other. This would happen, for example, when an accepted behavior in Deaf culture would be considered rude in hearing American culture, such as asking personal questions or remarking on the change in someone’s appearance. After discovering the field of intercultural communication in graduate school, I learned that these kinds of misunderstandings are quite common when people from two different cultures interact.
Harumi explained that growing up deaf in a Deaf family, she didn’t really think much about culture. It was during a trip to America when she was first struck by the power of cultural differences. One night, an American gave her a ride back to the house where she was staying. Harumi knew that in American culture, it is considered polite for drivers not to speed off until they see their passengers having gotten safely inside their homes. In Japanese culture, however, the expectation is reversed. There, it is considered polite for the person who gets dropped off to wait outside until the person in the car drives away. Even though Harumi was aware of the expected behavior in America, she had difficultly acting contrary to her own cultural instincts, so she and the driver found themselves stuck in a politeness standoff, each of them waiting for the other to leave first.

On the subject of direct/indirect communication, Harumi and I agreed that in our respective countries, Deaf individuals tend to be more direct than their hearing peers. I explained my theory of the “sandwich approach” that American hearing people often employ when giving feedback, where a negative comment is “sandwiched” between two positive comments to make it easier to swallow. Japanese communication style practices a different sort of indirection, often using a “fill in the blank” approach to leave off the critical piece of information. For example, in spoken Japanese the word chotto (which literally means “a little”) is often used to infer a refusal without having to come out and state it directly. As in: Question: “Do you want to have dinner with me tonight?” Answer: “ Tonight is chotto …”

Harumi tells a story on her website about the time she noticed two burnt out light bulbs in the Xerox room of the college building where she teaches JSL. She wrote the following email to the appropriate person in the chain of command to have them replaced: “Two electric lights in the Xerox room are burnt out, would you please request the section head in charge to replace them”. Having a suspicion that her email might not be perceived as entirely polite by the hearing co-worker, she showed it to a hearing colleague in her department, who quickly helped her edit her request. The revised request read as follows: “Two electric lights of the Xerox room are burnt out, please see to it...”

Another time, after finding errors in a document that a hearing staff member had written, she called the person on the phone and, through an interpreter, asked, “With regard to the errors in the document, should I make the replacement document or would you?” A hearing colleague overheard this phone conversation and said, “Oh, that expression sounded as if you demanded the staff member to make the replacement document.” In Japanese, it should be left at, “With regard to the errors in the document, the replacement should be...”

Harumi and I discovered another commonality regarding the situation of Deaf people correcting hearing students’ signs. We agreed that Deaf people appreciate a response of “Thank you” after offering what they view as helpful advice. In Japan, Harumi noted that many students meet this type of correction with abject apologies, while I ventured a guess that American students who may also be caught off-guard and feel hurt when corrected may even respond with a defensive remark such as, “My other sign language teacher taught me that sign”. Harumi told a related story of what would happen if she noticed that a stranger’s tires looked worn and told the person that it would not be safe to continue driving on them. A Deaf person receiving that comment would thank her for it, while a hearing person would be shocked, feeling that it was none of her business.

In both of our countries we found a similar distinction between hearing and Deaf behavior when arriving late to a meeting; hearing people are more apt to make a short remark or apology while Deaf people are more likely to recount the series of events that led up to their late arrival.We ended the evening comparing the way that advances in technology have affected Deaf culture in our two countries and agreed that text pagers have been a wonderful development. Then I explained a little about working in Video Relay (which has not yet appeared in Japan) and how much American Deaf people appreciate the access it has given them. Harumi had a surprising reaction, expressing shock at the idea that people/interpreters she did not know would be able to see into her house. She explained that in Japan the distinction between private space and public space is very strongly felt. She concluded by expressing doubt that VRS could ever come to Japan as she thought Deaf people would never be willing to allow strangers to see into the sacred private space of their homes. Even though this was the opinion expressed by one Deaf Japanese leader, the implication could not be clearer. Despite the many similarities we identified in Deaf/hearing interactions in our two countries, the power exerted by specific cultural values still illuminates the defining differences between us.