I interact with a fair number of Japanese counterparts. They’re so polite in 90% of contexts that this one has me wondering lately.
Are thank you/follow-up/bread-and-butter letters (or now e-mails) not common/done in Japanese business culture? I get taken out to dinner, and vice versa, with lots of Western counterparts. IME, if I buy, they send a quick thank you e-mail, and vice versa.
The Japanese – not so much I’m noticing – and not for small stuff only, for expensive dinners, pro sports events – not a word, generally. As I think about it, they generally do say something nice at the event/in person. But they seem much less prone to formalize that as we would with a brief note.
Did the thank you note/e-mail just never catch on there? I don’t want anyone to suck up to me (for instance, I count it as a slight negative when a job interviewee sends me a fulsome thank you follow up), I just need to make sure it’s not that I’m doing something wrong that leaves my Japan counterparts disinclined to follow up after I try to host them . . . .
Do your Japanese counterparts give you some sort of gift or token when you meet them? As I understand it, the little gift at the meeting is their version of the thank you note.
Upon initial visits, when they’re joining us at our site more than the other way around, and on big foreign trips – usually. But for the ones whom we see often, or are resident in the West, no, they don’t do gifts each time we meet. (I also get the impression the business gift culture may be waning, though I’ve milked it for a good bit of booze and knicknacks).
I don’t think “thank you” cards and notes are very common. Instead, there are regular (summer o-chugen/winter oseibo) gifts given out over the year which generally show “thanks” for all you’ve done over the year. This is a very formalized part of the culture and they might not do it outside Japan because they know that you don’t have the same custom.
Huh, I’ve gone to dinner/lunch with clients and suppliers many times and there were no thank-you emails. This was in countries in Europe and America. Maybe it is because we were always going to see each other soon, I don’t know, but it never occurred to me to send “thank you for taking us out yesterday” and would have found such a letter strange.
Isamu, in Hispanic countries we have those gifts in the winter. They’re called aguinaldos or cestas (lit. baskets).
Just to add something more to the thread my, otherwise mostly normal, Japanese wife is noticeably thrown off balance when she receives gifts from my relatives. She doesn’t know what to do in return because there’s no specific formula to follow that she knows about (outside of the Japanese way). I tell her she should write a short letter of thanks but she says she wouldn’t know what to say in the letter. :rolleyes: She’s gotten better at this over the years though.
My take on it is that there are a large number of people who subscribe to the idea that if you don’t know specifically what is the ‘right’ thing to do, do nothing.
Ring of truth. Most of the perfectly nice Japanese people I spend time around seem nervous about 85% of the time about doing something gauche or wrong. I’d say the majority of my conversations begin with their saying “I am so sorry . . .” A colleague and I had a hard time keeping straight faces last time we were over there and it became a running joke that every customer service interaction began with someone scurrying over to us and saying how sorry they were to keep us waiting (for all of nine seconds, of course).
