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When an American company opened an office in India: Business operations needed to adjust to include frequent phone-based conference calls. The American team quickly began to complain about the language skills of the Indians, claiming that they were too difficult to understand over the phone. Tensions mounted over time, and
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A multinational team in the United States: On this team, a Japanese engineer was getting increasingly frustrated with his American manager. He sent repeated formal emails to the manager requesting action, but did not get any ‘appropriate’ response. After weeks of such frustration, he became so upset that he began
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New years at our house means two things: Food and Japanese TV. My wife is from Japan, so when it comes to big holidays we do some American-style and some Japanese-style. New years is about as big as it gets in Japan, so we do it her way. It is
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We have 3 kids who we are teaching to speak Japanese. We also have Japanese TV by satellite at home. This means that we show the kids the popular children's shows from NHK (Nihon Housou Kyoukai -- Like the BBC but Japanese). Some of these shows have been
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Bento. Traditional lunchboxes from Japan. I would go so far as to say that Bento is becoming an English word. In case you don't know, it means a lunchbox (usually for children), containing carefully prepared tiny portions of different kinds of food. I have compiled my own take
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Working with Japanese engineers, one thing that was hard to get used to is how the phone is handled. I have noticed that for Japanese, being on the phone is often the same as being face-to-face with the person on the other end of the line. It is not infrequent
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Japan is funny sometimes. We watch Japanese TV at home (more than American shows) and I noticed that a number of TV personalities all disappeared at the same time. The NHK news announcer lady, the performers on the kids TV show "okaa-san to ishyo", and others. In addition,
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Information flow in the Japanese community is down-right scary. One person hears something, then the grapvine kicks in, and before you know it, everybody knows everything about everything. Take as an example, what happened recently at a company here in Austin. (I will be deliberately vague here to protect the
Culture
Here is a funny story about 'being in charge' that came about on a multinational project's ski trip a few years ago. A group of about 20 engineers and managers from different companies (Japanese, and American) went skiing together in Salt Lake City. We were all
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I have observed that there can be difficulties when working with people from other cultures. Occasionally though 'culture' gets blamed for things that it shouldn't. Just as there are difficult people in your own culture, be aware that there are difficult or 'different' people
Culture
In the context of international engineering projects... A coworker of mine who has worked with people from many different cultures was recently observing how impressed he was with the German engineers that he has encountered in his career. He glowed about how thorough their documentation was and about how smoothly
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What does it take to 'get ahead' in Japan? More than anything it means that you graduated from the right university. At the top of the pack is Tokyo University (東大 pr./tow-dai/ -- short for 東京大学 pr. /Tow-kyou Dai-gaku/). If you have aspirations to work as a