First, about the pricing — could you get it to us sometime this week?

Understood. We’ll proceed as you described.

There are a few things I’d like you to answer in return.

・Production start: January 1 next year

Would the delivery deadline remain the usual two months prior? It would help if we could receive the order two months before that (September 1).

・Expected volume: 1 million units per year

What monthly production volume are you anticipating?

The ones we’re aware of are AAA-0001 and its derivative BBB-0009. It would help to get information on the differences between these as well.

There is also CCC-0007, a derivative of BBB-0009. I’ve attached PDFs of each datasheet and an Excel file summarizing the differences. Please take a look.

Thank you very much.

Something along those lines.

What I want to point out here is that in this exchange, no topic gets dropped.

By properly using inline quoting, B makes sure no question or reply falls through the cracks. Perhaps this is Japanese meticulousness at work.

Americans don’t have this culture.

At least among the people I deal with, it’s completely absent.

Indians and Taiwanese, incidentally, often did use inline quoting. Singaporeans, less so, I think.

What baffles me endlessly is that nobody seems to worry about whether it’s okay to skip inline quoting.

Let’s imagine how an American, Person C, might reply to A’s email above.

Hi A-san

Thanks for the other day. We’ll move forward on getting the pricing out this week. To do that, please tell us the monthly production count. Since our delivery takes two months from order, please place the order by September 1, working backwards as usual. Attached CCC-0007 and the other datasheets along with the differences. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Have a great weekend! American C

Something along those lines, probably.

Note that this deliberately drops nothing. The content is exactly the same as what B wrote.

But doesn’t it feel a bit uneasy somehow?

A few characteristics stand out.

First, with no line breaks, it just runs on, and the topics are hard to grasp. Second, it casually packs multiple topics into a single sentence. And since inline quoting is never used, if the reply comes after some time has passed, you can lose track of the content.

Below, I’ve tried to analyze, in my own way, why things end up like this.

Before the analysis, one note.

America has run this way for a very, very long time.

And as one of the top industrial nations in the world, no less.

In other words, it would be easy enough to deny this habitual “way of exchanging information”: “It doesn’t match my own way, my own experience. So it’s wrong.”

No, that’s not it.

That attitude is foolish.

Given that results are being produced, there must be something to learn from it, and to do that, we need to read into what lies behind it.

That’s the spirit in which I’ll continue writing below.

As a basic premise, note that linguistic factors are set aside here. Indians use English too, and my exchanges with Taiwanese colleagues are also in English. So that’s not what this is about.

Now then, the first thing that comes to mind, somewhat simplistically, is

The habit of loving to talk

as one possible contributing factor.

Americans, on the whole, tend to be people who love to talk.

I wrote in another post that this is a culture of “eloquence is gold, silence is elimination.” (insert link)

It’s easy to imagine that even when repeating or quoting something, there’s a fundamental desire to say it in one’s own words. This same tendency shows up in Japanese people who love to talk, too.

What benefit does this bring?

“New discovery” is what I suspect.

Even with the same content, chewing it over once and spinning it into your own words might reveal a new perspective or direction.

In other words, this rephrasing may help both the sender and the receiver gain a multifaceted view of things.

In America, there’s a broad tolerance for clashing opinions.

It’s only natural that people have different opinions, and that alone is no reason to dismiss them. If you have time to deny someone else, spend it affirming yourself instead.

To a Japanese person, this might at first look like “isn’t that the same thing?” but it’s quite different.

What matters is accepting another person’s opinion as its own thing.

That doesn’t mean being convinced by it, much less revising your own thinking. It’s “that’s that, this is this.”

Because of this, people don’t chase some single, complete, one-and-only answer, reasoning like “this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, so the plan I have left is the right one.”

It’s only natural for opinions to differ — this is correct, and that is too, and so is that other one.

So, to put it in extreme terms, not answering part of someone’s question can be reframed as the assertion “I don’t think that’s an important question that needs answering.”

The friction or debate that arises from this is welcome.

This might be a bit of an overstatement, but “picking something up by dropping something else” — an equal exchange — is a principle that can hold true anywhere, in anything.

Here, it seems, meticulousness gets shaved away in exchange for creativity and room to grow.

Now, let’s move on to the next hypothesis.

The habit of survival of the fittest

Earlier I deliberately wrote Person C’s reply so that it dropped nothing, and indeed, a sufficiently sharp person could probably keep operating that way all the time, without dropping anything.

In other words, someone who drops something or makes a mistake over something this trivial naturally falls by the wayside.

Even in writing with no line breaks that just runs on, a sharp person should be able to pick out the topics accurately.

This survival of the fittest can be derived as a keyword from another angle as well.

That is

Hatred of email

Let me take a slightly different angle from the “loves to talk” point made earlier.

Thinking about it carefully, even in Japan, when writing ordinary prose, people tend not to insert line breaks much and just write on and on.

The writing style used in emails or blogs is, in the end, something built up culturally, acquired rather than innate.

Put differently: because Japanese people love email and have written a great many of them, email writing that is easy to read, easy to understand, and efficient has been cultivated over time.

An old culture of “letters” (fumi)? Maybe that’s too grand a way to put it.

Thinking about it this way, Americans clearly hate email.

They’ll come talk to you about anything, no matter how trivial. They’ll talk to you even when you’re pretty clearly in the middle of something.

Even for procedures too complicated to remember all the steps, they’ll contact you by phone.

Meetings, too, often get decided purely through conversation, with no digitized log left behind.

Not using email means more conversation happens instead. In Japan too, the decline in communication caused by overuse of email has been a topic of concern for quite some time. Some companies have probably taken concrete measures against it.

Frankly speaking, though, this tendency probably irritates Japanese people quite a lot. Spoken words vanish the moment they’re uttered, whereas with email, the send/receive history remains as a log, just as it is.

Proceeding with work without a log can, in many cases, end up like having your walking stick knocked away in the middle of a desert.

As a lighthearted example, take some trouble like this: “Hey, did you buy XX like I asked? I need it today.” “Huh? Boss, I wasn’t asked to do that?” “So-and-so says he asked you to.” Digging through the email log — “Let’s see, so-and-so replied last Friday saying he’d buy it himself. After that I was on a business trip, so I never saw him or called him.” “Oh, you’re right. My mistake, my mistake.” Something like that — if you keep things in email, you avoid being falsely blamed.

Conversely, if it’s purely verbal, the loudest voice probably wins.

“No, I told this to so-and-so right from the start. I remember it clearly. Last time with the delivery of such-and-such, he forgot to place the order too, didn’t he. What a pain. Well, never mind. Boss, I’ll arrange it urgently myself.”

If you get steamrolled like that behind the scenes, it’s the worst.

The worst.

But America has a culture where that’s possible.

Things aren’t kept all that tight.

And the culture where the loudest voice wins, as I mentioned, has become so entrenched it might as well be called part of American identity.

This survival of the fittest is a fairly nasty thing, but looked at from one economic angle, it does seem to produce a large effect once it all comes back around.

People with assertiveness speak up more and more, and through that, whether they’re right or wrong, they rack up a great deal of experience, change jobs frequently, get involved in various projects, and build up their skills. They keep giving that skill back to the world, project after project. Assertiveness is nearly synonymous with wanting to stand out.

Merely wanting to stand out and merely wanting to talk produce nothing on their own, but a person who can properly and reliably turn that into feedback will clearly grow far more than a passive person of the same ability.

Now, the last hypothesis is

Speed

Writing with no line breaks, no inline quoting — isn’t this meant to improve speed?

Programmers, for instance, use line breaks as needed to organize their code properly. That’s taken for granted, because there, a certain literacy — rules, common sense — has been established.

In other words, as long as there’s a rule, they’ll follow it.

But prose, email, has no rules.

Given that, writing straight through, on and on, is naturally the fastest way to do it.

Looking back at the email to figure out what to quote, copying and pasting it, writing a comment, then searching for the next part to quote, copy-pasting it, writing a comment again —

way too much of a hassle!

might be what’s going on.

My impression is that Americans carry both short-temperedness and easygoingness within them.

They switch between the two depending on the scene.

Driving on surface streets: easygoing Driving on the freeway: short-tempered

Buying something at a register: easygoing Buying something from a vending machine: short-tempered

At work: easygoing Heading home: short-tempered

Before starting to speak: easygoing Once they start speaking: short-tempered

I’ve never stared closely at a colleague writing an email, but I’m sure email brings out the short-tempered side.

Let me return briefly to the premise mentioned earlier. From this line of thinking, I want to try to draw out whatever strengths Americans might have.

Thinking along those lines, perhaps this switching between short-temperedness and easygoingness is actually a good thing.

Japanese people tend to be a consistent sort, so they can be cleanly sorted into “short-tempered people” or “easygoing people.”

In other words, they don’t switch between the two.

This builds up stress. Someone who’s short-tempered about everything just keeps accumulating it, and someone who’s easygoing about everything leaves the people around them accumulating the stress instead.

You see Americans’ exquisite easygoingness in all kinds of situations.

Their looseness about time is obvious enough without saying. But once this becomes entrenched as a culture, it does a great deal to reduce overall stress. Being overly strict about time raises the stress not only of the person who might be, or already is, late, but of everyone around them too. “I got here on time, but so-and-so is always…” If the very word “time” has already become something of a formality, there’s no need to fret over things like that.

Take Apple, for example — companies that deal with Apple often say Apple breaks its promises. This isn’t about anything written down in a document; it’s more the kind of thing that’s a verbal promise, a plan. To Japanese sensibilities, that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d swear firmly to keep, but Apple apparently isn’t like that. This, apparently, is also the unavoidable mess needed for the clear output of “making something good.”

Products shelved right after production starts, parts that don’t get decided even past the order deadline — things like that are commonplace.

You could say, rather elegantly, that all of it reflects decisions oriented toward the end customer.

If, right on the verge of a contract deadline, someone says “Hmm, let me think about it a bit more,” Japanese sensibilities might react with “hold on, is it really okay to be that easygoing about it?” But if that kind of thinking is, surprisingly, what leads to ultimate success, then perhaps it’s worth learning from it, and steeling ourselves to take on some of that mess too.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2013/06/53/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.