I got the following story from David Willoughby, a freelance writer now living in Tokyo:

Whilst in Japan, I happened to find myself seated next to another foreigner who recognised me from the gallery event we had both just attended. We chatted amicably for a while … A little while later, he stood up to leave. “If you like art,” he said to me, almost as an afterthought, “you might be interested in this.” And he nonchalantly tossed onto my table his business card on which he had biro’d the details of some upcoming event he was attending.

It wasn’t just the contrived nature of his networking spiel that made the exchange so unforgettable, it was in the small details. It was in the way in which he dealt his card onto the table rather than to me directly, minimising the chance that it might be rejected. It was in the fact that he waited until the final seconds of our encounter to produce it so that neither of us would have to endure the awkwardness of the moment. Before I had a chance to digest what was written on the card he had vanished.

The exchange would have been amusing for any watching Japanese who are, of course, far more comfortable with the use of business cards, or ‘meishi’. In the West, business cards are strictly for networking and careful consideration must be made about if and when to proffer the card – not so in Japan.

www.tokyoartbeat.com

Find more information about cross cultural differences in the exchange of business cards by clicking on the following links:

Top Ten Tips on passing business cards with cultural fluency

Japan: everything you need to know about business card ‘meishi’ etiquette

U.S.,  Britain, Australia: Business Card Etiquette

The art of business card giving: an East West perspective

Watch a Video on Chinese Business Etiquette

The United States and Canada are two very different countries. 
However, they both value independence and action, and they are geared to highly-paced change. Achievement of personal goals, wealth and prestige are driving factors for them both. Canadians, however, are much more interested in substance and facts, and are serious of content and purpose. This is the French influence on them. Canadians view themselves as the ‘younger brother’ to the USA, but do NOT want to be mistaken for Americans. Canada is very multicultural with the immigrant population seeing themselves as Canadians first.

So far in this section you’ll find the  Top Ten Tips for doing business in the US and Canada, along with opening times, holiday dates and festivities.

We all know the Far East is THE place in the world to buy fake Rolex watches, fake designer clothes and FAKE anything – but why is that so? Is it because of their cheaper manufacturing arm or could there be another, deep-seated reason?

Unfortunately, many western companies dealing with the Far East have learned to their cost that the region has a very different take on Intellectual Property  from people in the West. Confucius, the world-renowned great thinker in Chinese intellectual history, passed on a moral and ethical code that has long influenced the ways of that part of the world. He believed that ideas once in the public domain and belonged to everyone – so ideas written down belonged to humanity. So the Chinese have never grown up with the concept of copyright. In reality, IP wars can be argued to be the tussle between the intercultural dimension of Individualism and Communitarianism. Knowledge and ideas are seen as one’s own indivuidual property in the west. Not so in the East. So, cross-cultural differences exist.

Most Westerners get confused about when a “Yes” means “Yes” when interacting with people from the East. Now, it seems there is more to get confused about, with a study revealing that even facial expressions can be a source of confusion too. This time it is the East Asians who have a tendency to misinterpret more than Westerners.

It would appear that people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when trying to interpret expressions and this leads to the misinterpretation. East Asians tend to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects take in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth. Westerners tend to correctly identify the emotions in both white and Asian faces. East Asians are more likely than Westerners to read the expression for “fear” as “surprise”, and “disgust” as “anger”.

This is even reflected in the differing “emoticons” – typographical characters used to create rudimentary faces in emails or text messages – used by the two cultures. Eastern versions focus on the eyes, and western ones change the mouth to depict varying emotions.

The findings suggest that the communication of emotions is more complicated than had previously been believed. Rachael Jack, the psychologist who led the study, said: “Understanding facial expressions of emotion is an essential skill for effective human interaction and although many consider facial expressions to be the universal language of emotion, our research questions this and highlights the true complexities of cross-cultural communication.”

However, it is important to highlight here that in eastern cultures it is less socially acceptable to display negative emotions so they are not atuned to interpret negative facial expressions as they are rarely seen. Western societies are very individualistic, allowing us to express personal opinions explicitly – good or bad.  This is not acceptable in the East.

All in all, the study adds weight to what interculturalists have known for years: that what have always been considered to be “universal” expressions (by those in the West) do not take into account cultural differences.

The Study: Researchers at Glasgow University compared the way 13 Western Caucasians and 13 Korean, Japanese and Chinese participants interpreted the same set of facial expressions depicting seven main facial expressions: happy, sad, neutral, angry, disgusted, fearful and surprised. They used eye movement trackers to monitor where the participants were looking when interpreting the expressions. A computer programme given the same information from the eyes as the East Asian observers was similarly unable to distinguish between the emotions of disgust and anger, and fear and surprise.

The paper, entitled “Cultural Confusions Show that Facial Expressions are Not Universal,” is published today in the journal Current Biology. It states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust. It concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalisation.

In a recent documentary, Newt Gingrich states that American children are falling behind many other nations’ children in respect of their academic prowess.  He argues that they compare most unfavourably with Chinese and Indian children.  To add weight to this argument, a recent McKinsey report emphasises that the lagging performance of America’s school pupils, particularly its poor and minority children, is wreaking more devastation on the economy than the current credit crunch and recession.  American children, it seesms, are ill-equipped to compete and perform poorly in international educational test.

So, what seems to be the cause of this state of affairs? American academics put it down to ‘the summer learning loss’ over the long summer holidays and argue its exacerbating social inequalities. In addition to the longer summer holidays that the children receive, American kids seem to work fewer days in the year, have a shorter school day and only about an hour’s homework a night. Compared to European and Asian schedules, it appears that American kids lose out on 180 days of school (an entire year) over the course of their schooling.