A book on negotiation talks about how Japanese businessmen say “It is not impossible” to politely mean “no chance in hell”.
Is this true?
Related to this, perhaps? Chinese culture and always answering "yes" - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
I’ve been around a lot of Japanese colleagues speaking English and that sounds right, though “very difficult” seems to be a more common way to say it. Also “yes, but perhaps it would be better to do <alternative>…” means the same thing.
I’d tend to use it with that meaning, and i’m not Japanese. “Well, it’s not impossible…” = …but it might as well be.
I work for Sony. It’s true that the Japanese can be very indirect about how they communicate negatives.
I had a colleague who got in serious trouble because of this tendency. He was collaborating on a videogame with a Japanese development house. The team was unwilling to express reservations about the design direction my friend was pushing for, even though they knew that the technical capabilities of their engine would make his vision impossible to achieve.
He kept saying “Let’s do this, and this, and this, okay?” and they kept telling him “It will be difficult.” He assumed they meant “It’s doable, but we’ll have to work hard”. Really they meant “What you’re asking for is not possible.”. It wasn’t until they delivered a badly broken build halfway through the project that he realized there was a problem.
I had a similar experience when I consulted for a major auto company back in the 80’s. It was their first cooperation with a Japanese company. When the American (or Canadian) engineers suggested something, the Japanese engineers would say yes. Then when the plans were formalized the Japanese ignored the suggestions. It took long negiotiations to determine the Japanese really meant “I understand your suggestion” and not “I agree with your suggestion.”
hamster and kunilou are exactly right. 10 plus years Japanese software development here.
the clue you are looking for is the famous “sucking air through the teeth” gesture. While the exact English words may vary due to language skill variations, that sound is a sure giveaway.
And you will never ever ever ever did I say EVER? hear the word “NO” no matter the situation.
You really have to learn to read between the lines.
It goes the other way too BTW.
If you say NO, no matter how trivial a matter, it will be final to them and nothing more can be developed in that line of reasoning.
you get good at reading body language and tone.
Also note the cases above where there are “…” the sentences will actually trail off verbally…in Japanese you hear the end even though no one actually spoke it. That happens when Japanese English speakers engage in this sort of negotiation in English too.
I used to live in Japan, and I’ve never heard that one. My Japanese isn’t very good (by which I mean it’s quite bad) so if this expression is used in Japanese then I probably wouldn’t know, but I’ve never heard it in English.
In fact, I can think of several times in Japan when I was told (in English) that something WAS impossible. This was amusing to me because it obviously wasn’t impossible for me to e.g. take photos inside the temple, it just wasn’t permitted. But I figured people thought it was more polite to phrase it as something that couldn’t be done, no one’s fault, it’s just impossible, rather than saying it was something I wasn’t allowed to do or that they weren’t allowed to do for me.
I’ve often heard it claimed that the Japanese will say “Yes” in response to a direct question when they really mean “No”, but I never encountered this either. Maybe it does happen, but when I’ve been given specific examples it was usually obvious to me that the Japanese person just misunderstood the question. Of course it’s easy to misunderstand a question asked in a foreign language, but certain common ways of constructing questions in English are especially likely to be confusing. For instance, if you ask Japanese speakers of English a question such as “Don’t you like root beer?” or “You like root beer, don’t you?” then they are likely to say “Yes” even though they hate root beer. They aren’t trying to be polite by not saying “No” (although it’s true that they don’t like to just say “no”). They are answering the question that they thought was being asked. They mean “Yes, that’s right, I don’t like root beer.”
I can imagine that some unfortunate English speaking tourists have probably asked questions like “We can take the bullet train to Nagasaki, can’t we?” and been told “Yes” by well-meaning Japanese who believed that they were helpfully informing the foreigners that such a thing indeed can’t be done.
This is true. In Japanese you say “Hai” (“Yes”) just to show that you’re paying attention. It’s not really agreement, it’s like saying “Uh huh” or “Yeah” in English.
I’ve had some experience with Japanese exchange students here in the US and it is a very frustrating cultural barrier to deal with. If I’d ask them “Are you feeling sick?” they’d always answer no, no matter how they felt. Or if I’d ask “Would you like to go to so and so movie?”, yes was always the answer. It drove me crazy and I told them time and time again that it was OK to disagree and that it was ok to tell me how they really felt.
One boy explained it to me finally. For instance, when I asked if he was feeling ill, for him to say “yes” would be putting me in a bad position because I was the host and thus would feel responsible for how he felt. It was actually MY duty to read his body language and see the signs to realize that yes, he was sick. Then instead of asking him, to take the proper steps to help him feel better.
the phrase should be ‘chotto muli’, which I learned as ‘could be difficult.’
a group of us at a foreign investment bank took about 6 months to really comprehend the phrase meant ‘no way in hell’
“Muri” (or “muli”) means “infeasible” so far as people say it.
Personally I’d just call all of this sort of thing “passive aggressive behavior”. You’re going to find passive aggressives in any country, just as you’ll find outspoken people. But yeah the ratios will vary by nation (or even region.)
Personally I’d call it “speaking Japanese”, which is what they’re doing. They’re not speaking English.
Any Japanese knows perfectly what the phrase “chotto muli/it could be difficult” means. It’s not passive aggressive behavior, it’s just Japanese culture and language.
Just like any American understands that when the cashier at the supermarket asks them “how are you today?” he does not really want to hear about your vaginal herpes flareup. It is just a polite lie which expects a polite lie in return: “fine, thanks”. I do not think we should conclude from this that Americans are congenital liars.
I am mildly shocked that someone would not understand that other languages and cultures are different and label a whole country and culture as beling passive-aggressive.
I’d like to second sailor, the phrase that’s being referred to, chotto muzukashii – “a little difficult”, means unequivocally “impossible”. This is the way people speak in any situation that requires a modicum of politeness. It has nothing to do with any personality disorder, not anymore than prefacing a sentence with “I’m afraid” denotes paranoia.
The phrase quoted by China Guy is somewhat less polite. Muri means impossible, there’s no euphemism there. Muri, by itself, is quite categorical and outside of informal contexts needs to be tampered with chotto – “a little”.
However, the OP asked about “it is not impossible”, which is a rather odd turn of phrase. I have never really encountered this exact phrasing either in English or Japanese.
Precisely. And that’s true even when they are speaking English - because what they (and most people, when speaking in a foreign language) are really doing is thinking in their language, and within the framework of their own culture, then translating the sentence into English, without regards for the difference in meaning, subtext etc…
It’s not even conscious, and it’s definitely not passive aggressive - they just don’t stop to think that other cultures don’t work the same, don’t follow the same linguistical or social conventions etc…
As to the OP, culturally Japanese people are very prudent and euphemistic when dealing with negative responses, because someone could take offense, or even worse, lose face, and that’s A Bad Thing. So instead of telling you what you’re asking for is impossible (which, to them, would be equivalent to publically saying they think you didn’t know that, and thus are stupid/unfit to make suggestions at all), they’ll politely tell you that they’ll give it a try, before privately discarding your input and doing what they think is best. Because that’s how it’s done in Japan.
It depends on who you are and who you’re dealing with, but in broad terms I’d say that’s not really true anymore, if it ever was.
I suppose this book is written for people who will be conversing in English with Japanese people. In that case, Japanese are more likely to be direct in what they say. Brutally straightforward in some cases, because of language limitations, or because that’s how they think business negotiations in English should be conducted.
I was in a meeting last week with two very polite European guys (speaking English) and five members of our firm (all, bar the translator and I, having either rudimentary English or none at all). After pleasantries were exchanged and we got down to talking, it became clear to me that the European guys were saying that if they didn’t get X from us, then they wouldn’t do Y for us in the future. This was pretty clear from a native English speaker’s point of view, but I could tell that no one else at our side of the table was getting it - they continued to waft off into other topics. Meanwhile the Europeans were getting a bit peeved because they weren’t getting an answer to what they thought were (in a Japanese context) direct questions. I had to intervene a few times when our translator got it wrong because he wasn’t conveying a hint with the appropriate gravity.
So it works both ways. Westerners expect to be confounded by Japanese inscrutability and Japanese expect to be assaulted with Western directness. When both parties try to acommodate the other based on their own expectations of the other, hilarity ensues.
My guess is that the phrase meant is something along the lines of “muri ja nai kedo…” with the all important “kedo…” being dropped by the author of the book.
I think I’ve heard it in English along the lines of what Revenant Threshold mentioned.