While Japan has been on center stage of the world economy for decades, interactions between the Japanese and Westerners continue to be on the rise. Daily communication in both business and social settings is commonplace, and connections through the Internet and mobile media make what felt distant only a few years ago seem familiar. Our cultures and social norms remain vastly different, however, and professionals working in Japan are likely to confront new challenges every day. For example, what are the three biggest challenges for Westerners who go to work in Japan? How can you tell when “yes” might mean “no”? When you are the guest in a taxi, who should sit where? In the fully updated second edition of With Respect to the Japanese, readers discover not only answers to basic etiquette questions, but also how to communicate successfully with the Japanese and, in the process, earn mutual respect. John C. Condon and Tomoko Masumoto use real-life examples (from kindergarten classrooms to the boardroom) to explain the contrast between these two distinct cultures. In this essential guide to Japanese culture, you will learn how vital societal characteristics affect communication, decision making, management styles and many other aspects of work and everyday relationships.

This book empirically explores how different linguistic resources are utilized to achieve appropriate workplace role inhabitance and to achieve work-oriented communicative ends in a variety of workplaces in Japan. Appropriate role inhabitance is seen to include considerations of gender and interpersonal familiarity, along with speaker orientation to normative structures for marking power and politeness. This uniquely researched edited collection will appeal to scholars of workplace discourse and Japanese sociolinguistics, as well as Japanese language instructors and adult learners of Japanese. It is sure to make a major contribution to the cross-linguistic/cultural study of workplace discourse in the globalized context of the twenty-first century.

Fully revised and updated, this book offers the most comprehensive review available in English of the many facets of Japanese vocational education and training.

Most books about Japan will tell you how to use chopsticks and say "konnichiwa!" Few honestly tackle the existential angst of living in a radically foreign culture. The author, a three-year resident and researcher of Japan, tackles the thousand tiny uncertainties of living abroad. -- Adapted from back cover

_______________ 'Surreal and unsettling' - Observer Cultural Highlight 'Wise, comical and exceptionally relatable' - Zeba Talkhani 'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo _______________ A woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place? As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful... _______________ 'An irreverent but thoughtful voice, with light echoes of Haruki Murakami ... the book is uncannily timely ... a novel as smart as is quietly funny' - Financial Times 'Polly Barton's translation skilfully captures the protagonist's dejected, anxious voice and her deadpan humour ... imaginative and unusual' - Times Literary Supplement

Rather than focusing on the psychology of personal emotions at work, this study concentrates on emotions as role requirements, on workplace emotions that combine the private with the public, the personal with the social, and the authentic with the masked.

Why on earth would anyone give up a life on the open road for the regimen of a vast Japanese conglomerate? And is it really so different in Japan from everywhere else? Niall Murtagh spent years as a world traveller - hitchhiking to Istanbul, bussing to Kathmandu and crossing the Atlantic in a home-built yacht. In 1986 he closed the door on his adventurous life and settled down in Japan, eventually joining Mitsubishi as a Salaryman - a man in a shiny suit with a shiny attache case in a conglomerate with 100,000 employees. And what happens when you give up the Salaryman life? The book follows life after the corporation, giving fresh perspectives on the nature of Japanese business culture and the problems faced by outsiders in Japan.