Reconnoitring the Old Empire

One of the more enjoyable aspects of cultural adjustment has been the process of integrating into the British work environment. I find myself in an unusual position because, despite having been born and brought up in a former British colony, my entire working life (all four years of it) has been spent in Japan.

Well, not quite in Japan, but in Okinawa, in fact, where rapid 20th century industrialisation, the continuing post-war occupation, and the overlay of mainland Japanese culture on the sub-pacific island culture of the subtropical archipelago has fostered a unique work ethic. This ethic is, generally speaking, deference of the will of the individual to the greater social good balanced with stubborn defiance in the face of external pressure and yet a familiar "she'll be right mate" attitude to it all. I cannot profess to be familiar with the British system after only two months of experience, but let me share two of my initial cross-cultural observations of the cultural peculiarities of a strange old empire compared with those of another even stranger one (you guess which is which).

Firstly, British meetings. In Japan, meetings are usually the forum in which decisions that have been made are shared with the group to build consensus and mutual understanding. The decisions are initially formed at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, and then filtered up slowly through the layers of management, passed back down for review, and percolated back up in a process of fine tuning before upper management approval, at which time a meeting is held to share the details of the finalised plan. In the Queen's country, however, people have a meeting to discuss an idea. The idea is thrown roughly into a verbal arena and then undergoes a barrage of debate until the weaker debaters tire and the victor has their idea implemented. If you liked Ben Hur then you'll love British meetings.

Secondly, if you ask a colleague a question in Japan then it usually puts them under pressure to give you the correct answer. If they don't know the answer then they will usually make thinking noises, which indicates that they don't know and gives you an opportunity to tactfully change the subject so they are not forced into telling you that they can't help. Foreigners, of course, don't initially know that this is what thinking noises mean and will keep prodding for the answer, eventually forcing the Japanese person into the shameful position of having to admit they don't know. In the United Kingdom, however, whenever I have asked a question that the other party does not apparently know, they tend to behave in one of two ways.

The first type of behaviour is to deny that the question is an issue. For example, if you have a sleeping tiger on your desk and you ask somebody "what do we do if it wakes up?" and they don't know then they might say something like "It was really sleepy yesterday old chap, so it probably won't wake up for ages, what!" Then you might reply, "Okay, but it will wake up eventually, so what should we do then?" They would then reply, "I say my good man, I had a stuffed tiger when I was six and I never had a problem with it. Jolly good show." They can avoid the question like that for hours.

The second type of behaviour is to just start talking. Again, faced with the sleeping tiger question, they might reply, "Right, well, I saw a tiger in Africa once when I was on safari. We has this driver from Morocco. Good chap, Gerald was his name. You see, his father was from France, but he always wished he had been born in Texas and had been called Gerald, so that's what he named his son. Ended up in Africa as a florist, I forget why. But I always liked flowers, my uncle was a botanist you see, even though he was colour blind..." and so on.

It's all very interesting. I'll keep you updated. If it gets too risky to post on the blog then perhaps I'll hide my communications in a rock.

Thoughtfully yours,

Ian