Only almost formal, exceedingly polite and necessary conversations are part of the social norm, and you see, it is OK for a few billions or so.
This does not describe Finland at all. If you go to a convenience store in Japan and buy a pack of gum, the clerk will go through an elaborate script of welcoming you to the store, reciting how much your purchase costs, how much cash they receive from you, how much change they give you in return, and thanking you for your custom. In Finland, more likely than not you can complete exactly the same transaction without either party saying a word (except maybe the clerk telling you the total).
A Norwegian husband took his French wife to live in Norway. She was at home while he went to work, and after a few months he invited another couple home to dinner. Most of the conversation happened in French or English as she had not yet picked up much Norwegian, but when leaving, she wanted to try.
After they left, the husband asked her "why did you say 'pose' when they were leaving?" She asked if she'd gotten it wrong - it was what the cashiers always said as she was leaving the shop, so she'd assumed it was "goodbye". (for the non-Norwegians: 'pose' means bag, as in a shopping bag; they were asking if she wanted one) The idea that a one word utterance as she was leaving could be an insignificant question rather than wishing her good bye had not crossed her mind.
Of course, with the additional difficulty of Danish pronunciation, I wasn't able to search for the words, and didn't try and repeat them.
(pose → purse, if you like to learn with cognates.)
So small talk, then.
Not necessarily. It seems like major motivators (not necessarily consciously realized) are to show off and to talk about oneself.
Cosplay of intelligence is another big motivator - how could one possibly look like he have nothing to say?!
Edit: "Welcome to the store [some mini sales pitch]" might count as small talk, but is not what most people have in mind.
It’s so funny when sometimes the clerk has been doing it that job so long that it’s not proper words anymore and you’re not even expected to parse it correctly, it just doesn’t matter.
I don't think I've ever paid for a purchase without being told what the total is or being asked if I would like a receit.
Like ever.
I started to feel a bit more relaxed when I could go to the corner-shop and buy food without having to understand much Finnish, and the constant repetition helped me learn my numbers.
(Now and again a staff-member will confuse me by asking "Would you like anything else?" or "Is that all?" which throws me off. The only other questions I expect to be asked are "Would you like a bag?" or "Do you have a store-card?".)
Watch any kind of TV show from back then and notice the formality in the clothing of presenters, the substantially more discernible pronunciation, the vocabulary. The cultural shift towards informality is a recent trend in the West.
There was also a cultural fashion in the US to use a "Mid-Atlantic accent". Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent :
> The Mid-Atlantic accent, or Transatlantic accent,[1][2][3] is a consciously acquired accent of English, intended to blend together the "standard" speech of both American English and British Received Pronunciation. Spoken mostly in the early 20th century by Americans, it is not a vernacular American accent native to any location, but rather, according to voice and drama professor Dudley Knight, an affected set of speech patterns whose "chief quality was that no Americans actually spoke it unless educated to do so".[4] The accent is, therefore, best associated with the American upper class, theater, and film industry of the 1930s and 1940s,[5] largely taught in private independent preparatory schools especially in the American Northeast and in acting schools.[6] The accent's overall use sharply declined following the Second World War.
On the UK side of the Atlantic, the Received Pronunciation was considered the appropriate form of English in BBC broadcasts, leading to "BBC English", which again reflected upper class use. As I recall, it wasn't until the 1980s when BBC announcers were more free to use regional dialects.
So when you view history through TV, remember that you are also seeing it through a upper-class lens.
These days, in tech certainly but across many industries, "dressing up" is mostly an outlier.
Many companies are trying to emulate west coast tech companies. Especially Silicon Valley. I’ve seen a lot of initiatives geared toward “millennials” in a couple big companies I worked at. Including getting rid of the khaki business casual.