Week 10 Intercultural Communication

In Australia, there are a lot of people who are from different nations such as Asia and Europe. Each nation has its own culture and customs. Therefore Australia has many multicultural communities in various ways such as university and workplace. It must be very difficult to find a mono-cultural community in this country. For example when I was in Monash University, there is a club called “Japanese Club”, but people who join the club come from different nations. It means that we have to learn Intercultural communication. This post will focus about two examples of my experiences.

Firstly I have realised that communication style is very different between Australia and Japan. Australian people have a tendency to speak out their opinion and ideas much clearer than Japanese people.  For example, if someone says “Yes” in Australia, it means yes. On the other hand it could be no in Japan. Japanese people have to seek the actual meaning from nonverbal expression and social setting. According to Guffey and Loewy (2011), this difference is called low and high context culture. They said that “low context culture tend to be logical, analytical and action oriented”. In the business, people believe that stressing their opinions and ideas is professional and efficient. This is very Australian style culture. However high-context cultures are not straightforward and Japan must have this culture. This is because in Japan, people tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships and nonverbal expression. However when I was working in a big IT firm in Sydney I found it very difficult to understand what Japanese clients actually think about. This might be because I mainly used email to contact my clients and I could not see any nonverbal expression from my clients. Additionally it might be because I had spent more than 5 years of my life in Australia, and I may adopt low context culture already.

Through my work experience, I found that Japanese people tend to focus on small issues. In my workplace, so many Japanese clients asked me about small technical issues which people from other nation would not think about. For example one of the client kept compiling and decompiling the data by using three computers and finally the data does not compile anymore. However I tested many times but I could not find the technical issue and my manager said that no one would do the same thing furthermore one of my colleague got very frustrated.  The way of Japanese people thinking about the technique is the main cause of the conflict. However Japan has created lots of cars and computers, such as Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Toshiba. It may be because Japanese technicians always try to improve their products as much as they can. On the other hand Australia do not have many car or computer company as Japan. It may be because Australian do not focus on techniques as much as Japanese.

Guffey and Loewy (2011) mentioned how Japanese culture is different with Western cultures many time and various ways in the text book.  AS a Japanese person who lives in Australia for a long time, I must have learnt intercultural communication a lot through school and workplace. Two examples that I mentioned are only small parts of my experience.

Guffey, M.E. & Loewy, D (2011) Intercultural Communication. Business Communication Process and Product (7^th ed). Mason, USA, South Western Cengage Learning.