At Japan Expert Insights, we like to say that our training programs are built on stories that help us understand terms as “context-rich communication”. Below is a real-life story that you might enjoy.

A while back, we went to my mother-in-law’s home town to visit relatives. Although Mom left the town at the age of 18, she still has friends in the area and wanted to visit a high-school girlfriend who married in the neighboring town.

When we got there and tried to find her friend’s house, we realized that the crossroads by which Mom’s friend’s house once stood was gone: the street was a straight stretch of asphalt, no bends or crossroads in sight.

While driving up and down the road in search of the house, we ran into an elderly woman walking her dog. We stopped the car so Mom could ask: “We are looking for Sanae san’s house. It should be on this street but we can’t find it. Can you help us?” The woman replied, “Sanae san? I am not sure… What is Sanae san’s family name?” “I can’t remember it right now,” said Mom, “but she and I went to high school together and she married the (town’s) doctor’s son soon after that.”

Mom is 80-years old and the woman she was asking for help – a stranger – looked a decade younger. I was sure there was no way of her knowing who Mom was talking about and we would have to go home without accomplishing our mission. But then the woman said: “Ah, the doctor’s son! They moved house a while back and now live on the other side of town.”

In this tightly-knit community where family histories seem to be common knowledge, it took a cryptic, two-minute long conversation between two strangers to find the new location of Sanae san’s house. Although the details Mom supplied were nothing more than tangential, she and the local woman were connected through shared acquaintances, family names, or even a local institution (the town doctor). They remembered people not just as individuals but as parts of entire family lineages. Shared knowledge, long-time relationships, and implicit understanding of what was and what had been made for a cryptic yet very effective in achieving the desired result conversation. I couldn’t but appreciate the power of shared knowledge, especially when opposed to my outsider’s perception of the (lack of) logic and (un)expected outcome.

Understanding high-context communication is key to understanding and engaging meaningfully in social interactions in Japan. This is even more so when doing business here because information is often embedded within relationships rather than openly stated.

Can you succeed in such an environment? In our talks, my friend and fellow cross-cultural consultant Tim Sullivan and I have come to the conclusion that it takes a certain kind of person, many mistakes and a considerable amount of time to master the ins and outs of high-context environments. Patience, generosity, relationship- & trust-building, and awareness of social cues rather than expecting direct answers or explicit instructions help a lot. So do other people’s success & failure stories, too.

Learn about another traditional value that still shape social and business practices in Japan, read this article.