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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to overstate just how bloated emails are in Japanese. They seem to follow a very strict script. Once you learn the key words, it's easy to write and understand, but it's so much fluff for so little meaning. I've gotten dozens of lines from single emails just asking me about confirming a skype interview date, while any normal English message would literally be no more than, "Sure, let's talk at X:XX PM. Contact us beforehand if you have any troubles."

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There are also small details that you will learn the first time doing it wrong.

For example, when contacting with someone outside of the company, you would NEVER refer to anyone in the same company as you with -san honorific (Mr./Ms.) via email even in maximum formality mode, e.g. "I'll forward this to Tanaka-san, head of sales" may be considered rude. Instead, you will have to skip -san, as in "I'll forward this to Tanaka, head of sales."

These small details are so subtle and there's a lot of them. Many people don't really mind if you use it wrong, but some do, so you have to always be cautious with.

Interesting rule. Do you know why that is? Is there some implied level of familiarity with coworkers?

IIRC from what my senior explained to me few years ago, this has to do with the inward and outward aspect of the Japanese business society and the Japanese language itself. The Japanese honorific is usually used from inward to the outward (e.g. to stranger, customer, partner, etc.)

I think the easiest way to think might be that you won't refer to your sister/brother with honorifics when talking about them with someone.

When you (an outsider) email a company, everyone in the company who replied to the email are considered belonging to the same group, so they should not use honorifics to refer to themselves regardless whether they are CEO or just random employee (even if you call them with honorifics in internal email.)

There's also another small rule regarding this, such as you can say something like "Uchida, the CEO" (CEOの内田) but NOT "CEO Uchida" (内田CEO) because the title in the latter is being used as a suffix, and considered a honorific (equivalent to -san). It's a weird rule.

Talking about your own “team” honorably (-san) is not humble. To be fair Japanese people have trouble with it all the time too; There are tons of results for on Google for phrase + polite or phrase + business

That's not a small detail, that's how basically everything about Japanese honorfics work... I.e. the uchi/soto is an important distinction.

I consulted for a Vietnamese tech company some years ago and was surprised to see that most internal emails among top management (most of whom had attended university overseas) were in English, rather than Vietnamese.

The reason? Written Vietnamese is too formal, and they prefer English for getting to the point quickly.

I find this explanation for their choice hard to believe.

I live in Vietnam, speak Vietnamese, and see millions of people post not-formal, to-the-point things on Facebook and Instagram every day.

Oh, don't be daft. You're comparing the way people act and speak on Facebook with how they are expected to act in a formal setting such as work?

Totally different ball game.

Maybe I should rethink how informal I speak at work. Or how formal I speak to my friends.

I absolutely think there are people where there's a huge gap and others where it's hardly noticeable ;)

I'm Vietnamese, some of us prefer English as it lack the formality for pronouns, those who have studied oversea are even more likely to use English in their daily conversation.

(interestingly, my friends point out that I seem to have different personality when using English instead of my mother language)

I am a native Slovenian speaker who speaks a bunch of different languages to varying degrees of "speak". I definitely feel each of them changes my personality somewhat in its own way.

I assume part of it is due the language used and part due to cultural traits you pick up when you learned it. Would be surprised if there was no feedback loop between language and cultures that use it.

> interestingly, my friends point out that I seem to have different personality when using English instead of my mother language

You may be interested in this thread from a few weeks back with numerous people testifying to that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13758623

I heard that South Korean airline pilots were required to speak in English while piloting so that copilots can let the command pilot know of dangerous situations. The formality in Korean would lock everyone into social roles that made it harder to have safe flights.

Two seperate Korean Air 747s have been piloted into the ground as a result of mistakes that went unchallenged due to the strict cultural power hierachy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Cargo_Flight_8509

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_801#After_th...

http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-a... has a little bit of a different take on this - mainly aimed at Malcom Gladwell's _Outliers_ discussion of these incidents.

The article goes a bit broader and it's been a few years since I read it in depth, but you might be interested the counter-perspective.

That was an insanely long article that I don't want to read carefully, so I'm not gonna refute it, but I'll just say that as a Korean citizen I have absolutely no problem believing that "Korean workplace culture" inside Korean Air contributed to these accidents.

Yes, sure, if anyone claims that such a workplace culture is an inherent, inseparable part of Korean culture, then that's bollocks. But most people aren't saying that. We're just saying that there's a hierarchical culture problem widespread in Korea, right now. Which is absolutely true.

For a less tragic and more comical example of what the culture is like in Korean Air, look up the "Peanut turnaround incident" of 2014 (땅콩회항) which earned Korean Air the memorable nickname of "Peanut Air" (땅콩항공).

(...the nuts were actually macadamia nuts, but "Macadamia Nut Air" doesn't roll off the tongue as nicely.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nut_rage_incident

Here is a counter-counter-perspective: Gladwell twists the truth a bit to make a good story, however AskAKorean also twists the truth a bit to make a good refutation. Based on the transcript that AskAKorea posted, it's very clear that the first officer is acting deferentially to the pilot. Specifically, the first officer uses polite speech with the pilot, and the pilot uses familiar speech with the first officer. This indicates quite a big social status gap. As an example, in my company (I am working in Korea), neither my manager nor my manager's manager uses familiar speech with me, I'd have to go up 3 levels for that to start happening. What Gladwell mentioned in his book about hierarchy does not feel exaggerated, and there's likely a large grain of truth to Gladwell's representation of what happened. Also, if you look through AskAKorean's previous blogs, you can notice a fairly nationalistic streak in his posts, which may explain his strong opinions regarding Gladwell's assertions.

What do you mean by formal?

I’ve always assumed Asian languages to be very informal as a lot of it has to do with context. At least that’s how some of my friends talk to each other. And one of the reasons why it’s so hard to blend in. It could also be possible that they rarely talk formally in person, and I’ve yet to experience it.

At least with Korean and Japanese, they are highly formal as they have different conjugations depending on the level of the person you're speaking to.

With Korean, spoken language among roughly same-age friends is informal, of course. But if someone is older, then there's a different ending, unless you know them well enough to speak in informal language.

If you're speaking to your boss there's a different level of formality, and people like your grandparents get honorifics which are also conjugated, but alongside with formality.

It also reinforces social pressures of obeying your boss/elders, which stem from Korea's roots in Confucianism/Neo-Confuncianism.

It's no wonder people like to use English sometimes.

When it comes to written language, there are formal and informal styles. I am a Mandarin speaker and can read texts and social media pretty well because it follows many spoken conventions. But I have great difficulty with the styles employed in most Chinese newspapers. It's not just the vocabulary, there are written conventions that I don't hear in conversational settings. One exception: The Apple Daily (蘋果日報) which uses a different written style for headlines, infographics, and body text. It's less formal, more colloquial, and easier to understand.

> I’ve always assumed Asian languages to be very informal as a lot of it has to do with context.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you're thinking about "East Asian languages omitting 'necessary' grammatical parts all the time", then you might be talking about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language

Note that this is a grammatical phenomenon exhibited by some languages (i.e., the characteristics of a language as a whole). Formality/informality is a concept associated with a particular "speech" inside a language, which is orthogonal to this. (You can say a particular speech in English is formal or informal, but it makes little sense to say that "English" as a whole is a formal or informal language.)

Interesting. I’ve mistakenly assumed that there is a relative difference between formal and informal counterparts. Considering the extreme informality of Eastern Asian languages, I didn’t think their formal language was on the opposite end of the spectrum.

On the contrary, both Chinese and Japanese are very formal as to the written. Ancient Chinese has a high bar between formally written and oral ones. In recent centuries the difference got smaller, but there is still a big difference. On the plus side, most Chinese write emails colloquially.

I've been living and working in Japan for 10+ years and totally know that feeling .. I even wrote an article about it: https://getworkjapan.com/2018/02/26/why-are-japanese-busines...

It doesn’t necessarily make anything easier that the natural default of courtesy in Japan is, when in doubt, “maximum formality is employed.” To be honest though, I prefer the sometimes confusing formality of Japan to the curtness (or downright rudeness) of the US. Especially when it comes to customer service, the people pumping your gas in Japan are more friendly and polite than most waiters in Michelin starred restaurants in the US.

Yea there’s a weird disjointness where customer service or service industry workers can be relatively rude or arrogant in person, but online you get the super courteous maximally formal (although usually templated) emails.

For what it's worth, people tend to be more courteous in smaller and more rural areas of the U.S.

Tend? Perhaps. I've lived, worked and traveled all over the U.S. The smallest town I lived in was Sherwood, Maryland (population 44 at the time), and I now live an hour outside NYC. It really totally depends on the person you're interacting with, their personality, the kind of day they're having, the days they had before that. Culture certainly determines a lot of it, but that is harder to reduce to small town/big town dynamics. In America some of our most densely populated places (i.e. New Jersey) have some of the lowest rates of depression and suicide. People may appear to be ruder to each other in those places, or not, but something about the proximity of so many other humans creates some sort of social behavioral order that allows them to get along. People are strange, is really the tl;dr.

It seems to me that when you interact with fewer people per day, you can put more time and energy into courtesy. There's also a higher chance you'll run into someone again, so there's more incentive to treat strangers well. And small towns tend to be less diverse, meaning there are fewer incidents of rudeness resulting from different cultural expectations.

> People are strange, is really the tl;dr.

My tl;dr would be "the US is big and complicated." I've seen people working stressful service jobs be incredibly polite in Houston, and baristas being checked-out jerks in small-town Colorado. Overall, I would say that people tend to be more polite when they have more mental energy to spend. That tends to be in quieter towns, but not always.

Most of the stereotypical Japanese salaryman things exist in the US, they just exist a lot more strongly in Japan.

Are there companies with an overwork culture in the US? Oh yeah, definitely. But how many expect everyone to work, say, 9-7:30 at a minimum, plus some time most Saturdays, and to go out to the bar after work as a team multiple times a week? That would be extremely rare, maybe some finance companies and startups have that kind of culture, but not many.

I don't know if the US is necessarily that rude in comparison to countries other than Japan. It also definitely depends on the situation. Checking out at a German supermarket makes self checkout in the US seem friendly.

Funny, as a Brit I found the super-servile attitude of US waiters really creepy. And if anything Japanese service is less formal in a way that makes everything more efficient - you call the staff over when you want something (or to pay) rather than having to wait for them to come to you.

I read his sample bloated email and found it interesting that they are writing it in the exact same way a (US) business would write a customer service email.

Agreed, it's a simple, polite request to a business partner.

George says: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usN3rpfFoGA&t=30s

Companies do this via E-Mail? Where I work you send someone a Google Calendar invite and they click "yes" or "no", and they can see if you have a free spot in your schedule beforehand, so it rarely goes wrong.

Google Calendar invites are still transferred over email, generally.

Sure, but the transport part isn't relevant to what the GP is mentioning, which is that apparently Japanese etiquette requires you to write some amazingly long E-Mail. With a calendar invite all that's abstracted away and you just get "can you make it at such-and-such date at such-and-such time? yes/no/maybe".

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