Chapter 3 - Australian-Japanese business interaction: Some features of language and cultural contact

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Japan has been Australia's major trading partner since the 1950s. There is thus a significant history of business contact between the two countries, in which the Japanese language has sometimes been the language of communication, though English dominates, especially in Australian settings. This is not necessarily so in the tourism sector where the Japanese language is increasingly used by service providers who may be Japanese, Australian or some other non-native speaker of the language. Since the Japanese are the largest group of international visitors to the country, it is not surprising that their language is the most widely-used foreign language in tourism situations.

This chapter introduces a number of features of Australian-Japanese interaction in Australia in the work domain, specifically business interaction in a variety of settings, including negotiations, courtesy calls, and business luncheons, all where the language used is English. In addition, reference is made to tourism service encounters - shopping and tour guiding situations - where, in the case of tourism sales encounters, the language used is often Japanese, and in tour guiding where only Japanese is used for Japanese groups.

My approach draws upon the work of J. V. Neustupny, who has provided the best conceptual development to date of our understanding of Japanese and non-Japanese interaction, as well as offering valuable insights into inter-cultural communication in general (Neustupny 1985a, 1985b, 1987, 1994b, 1996). Much of the discussion to be introduced here involves concepts which were elaborated upon by Neustupny but which have since been applied to various aspects of interaction in the work domain between Australians and the Japanese by myself and others.

The focus is primarily upon inter-cultural, rather than cross-cultural, behaviour. The distinction is important because contrastive analysis, the basis for cross-cultural comparisons, cannot cover many of the features which are specific to inter-cultural contact situations. The notion of a contact situation will be used as a basic construct in this chapter where, in its simple form, it refers to a situation involving a foreign element, typically a foreign participant (see Neustupny 1985a, 1996). It is thus synonymous with an inter-cultural situation. Situation and encounter are also employed interchangeably.