First, about the pricing — would it be possible to get it to us sometime this week?

Understood. We’ll proceed accordingly.

We’d like a few answers from you on the following.

• Production start: January 1st of next year

Would the delivery deadline of 2 months prior, as usual, be acceptable? It would help if you could place the order 2 months before that (September 1st).

• Expected volume: 1,000,000 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 about the differences between these as well.

There’s also CCC-0007 as a derivative of BBB-0009. We’ve attached the PDF datasheets for each, along with an Excel file summarizing the differences. Please have a look.

Thank you in advance.

Something like that.

What I want to point out here is that in this exchange, no topic falls through the cracks.

By using inline quoting properly, they make sure no question or reply gets missed. This is Japanese meticulousness, I suppose.

This culture doesn’t exist among Americans.

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

Incidentally, Indians and Taiwanese people often did use inline quoting. Singaporeans, not so much, I think.

What I find endlessly strange is that nobody seems to worry about whether it’s okay not to use inline quoting.

Let’s imagine, for example, an American named C replying to A’s email above.

Hi A-san

Thanks for the other day. We’ll move forward to get pricing out this week. To do that, please tell us the monthly production volume. Our delivery takes 2 months from order, so working backward as usual, please place the order by September 1st. Attached are the datasheet for CCC-0007 and the others, along with the differences. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Have a great weekend! American C

Something like that, probably.

Note that no topic was actually dropped here either. What’s written is exactly the same as what B wrote.

But doesn’t it feel a bit uneasy somehow?

Let me explain a few characteristics.

First, since there are no line breaks, it just runs on and on, making the topics hard to grasp. Second, it casually packs multiple topics into a single sentence. On top of that, since inline quoting isn’t used at all, if a reply comes after some time has passed, for instance, the content becomes hard to follow.

I tried analyzing why things end up this way, in my own way.

Before the analysis, let me note one thing: America has surely been running this way, forever, all along.

And as a top-tier industrial nation in the world, no less.

In other words, it would be easy enough to simply reject this habit, this “method of exchange,” of theirs. “It doesn’t match my way (my experience). So it’s wrong.”

No, that’s not it.

That kind of attitude is foolish.

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

With that intention, I’ll continue writing below.

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

The first thing that comes to mind, somewhat simplistically, is

The habit of being a talker

that this might be contributing as one factor.

Americans, on the whole, tend to be talkers.

I wrote in another post that it’s a culture of “eloquence is gold, silence doesn’t make the cut.” (insert link)

In other words, it’s easy to imagine that there’s a fundamental desire to “say it in my own words,” even if it’s repetition or quotation. The same tendency can be seen in Japanese people who happen to be talkers too.

As for what benefit this brings, I think it might be “new discovery.”

Even about the same thing, by chewing it over once and weaving it into your own words, you might find a new perspective or direction.

In other words, this “rephrasing” might help both sender and receiver gain a multifaceted way of looking at things.

In America, there’s generally a tolerance for disagreements of opinion.

It’s only natural that opinions differ from person to person, and that alone is no reason for casual rejection. If you have time to reject someone else, better to spend it affirming yourself.

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

What matters is accepting another person’s opinion as it is.

Not necessarily agreeing with it, and certainly not revising one’s own thinking because of it. It’s “that’s that, this is this.”

Because of this, people don’t fall into the kind of reasoning that chases a single, unique, complete answer for the situation: “this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, so the remaining option, mine, must be right.”

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

So, to put it in extreme terms, not answering part of someone’s question can be turned into the claim, “I don’t consider that an important question that needs answering.”

And the friction or discussion that arises from that is welcomed.

This might be a bit of an overstatement, but “picking something up by dropping something else,” an equal exchange, can serve as a guiding principle anywhere, in anything.

Here, it comes down to trading away meticulousness in exchange for creativity and room to develop.

Let’s move on to the next hypothesis.

The habit of survival of the fittest

I deliberately wrote C’s reply earlier as one with “nothing dropped,” but a smart person could probably keep operating that way, without dropping anything, indefinitely.

In other words, someone who drops something or makes a mistake at this level naturally falls behind.

Even writing on and on without line breaks, a smart person should be able to pick out the topics accurately.

And this survival of the fittest can also be derived as a keyword from another angle.

That is,

Dislike of email

I want to take a slightly different angle from the “wants to talk” idea earlier.

Come to think of it, even in Japan, when writing ordinary prose, people tend to write on and on without many line breaks.

The style of writing in emails or blogs ends up being something constructed as a culture, acquired after the fact.

In other words, one could think of it this way: because Japanese people love email and have written a great many of them, readable, easy-to-understand, efficient email writing has been cultivated that way over time.

A culture of “letters” going back a long way? Maybe that’s putting it too grandly.

Thinking about it that way, Americans clearly dislike email.

They’ll talk to you about even the most trivial things. They’ll talk to you even when you’re pretty deep into something else.

Even procedures too complicated to remember, they’ll contact you about by phone.

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

Not using email means more conversation. In Japan too, the decline in communication caused by overuse of email has been a topic of concern for quite a while now. There are probably companies that have taken concrete countermeasures.

Frankly speaking, this tendency probably irritates Japanese people quite a bit. Spoken words vanish on the spot, but with email, the history of sending and receiving remains as a log, as 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.

A lighter example: say, some kind of trouble. “Hey, did you buy XX like I asked? I need it today.” “Huh? Boss, I wasn’t asked to do that, was I?” “So-and-so says they asked you to.” Digging through the email log. “Um, so-and-so replied last Friday saying they’d buy it themselves. After that I was on a business trip, so I never met or called so-and-so.” “Oh, you’re right. My mistake, my mistake.” Something like that: if you’ve kept an email exchange, you can avoid being falsely blamed.

Conversely, if it were purely verbal, surely whoever has the louder voice wins.

“No, I told him from the start. I remember clearly. Last time with the delivery of such-and-such, too, he forgot to place the order, remember? What a headache. Well, fine. Boss, I’ll go arrange it urgently myself.”

If you got steamrolled like that behind your back, that would be the worst.

The worst.

But America has a culture where that’s possible.

Things aren’t all that tightly buttoned up.

And the culture I mentioned earlier, where the louder voice wins, has become so entrenched that it’s fair to call it an important part of America’s identity.

This survival of the fittest is fairly unpleasant, but looking at it from one economic angle, it does seem to have a large effect, in a roundabout way.

Assertive people speak up more and more, and in doing so, they get things right sometimes and wrong other times, accumulating a lot of experience, and they keep changing jobs, getting involved in various projects, and building up their skills. And they keep giving those skills back to the world, one after another. Because assertiveness is almost 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 get feedback from that will clearly grow far more than “a passive person with the same level of ability as him.”

Now, the last hypothesis is

Speed.

No line breaks, no inline quoting: aren’t these meant to increase speed?

Programmers, for instance, use line breaks as needed to keep their code properly organized. That’s a given, but there’s something like “literacy” (rules, common sense) established behind it.

In other words, as long as there are rules, they’ll follow them.

But prose (email) has no rules.

In that case, writing prose on and on without breaks is naturally the fastest way.

Going back through the email to figure out where to quote, copying and pasting it, writing a comment, then searching for the next part to quote, copying and pasting it, writing a comment…

Way too tedious!

That might be it.

My impression is that Americans carry both impatience and easygoingness within them.

They switch between the two depending on the scene.

Driving on side streets: easygoing. Driving on the freeway: impatient.

Buying something at a register: easygoing. Buying something at a vending machine: impatient.

Work: easygoing. Heading home: impatient.

Before they start talking: easygoing. Once they start talking: impatient.

I’ve never sat there staring at a colleague writing an email, but I bet email is the impatient mode.

Let me go back to the premise from earlier: from this line of thinking, I want to polish out whatever advantages Americans might have.

Thinking about it that way, maybe this switching between impatience and easygoingness is actually a good thing.

Japanese people tend to be a consistent sort of people, so they can be cleanly divided into “impatient people” or “easygoing people.”

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

This builds up stress. Someone who’s impatient about everything will just keep accumulating it, and someone who’s easygoing about everything: the people around them are probably the ones accumulating stress.

You see America’s exquisite easygoingness in all kinds of situations.

The looseness around time sense goes without saying. But once this becomes entrenched as a “culture,” it does a great deal to reduce overall stress. Being too strict about time raises the stress not just of the person who might be, or is, running late, but of the people around them too. “I’m here on time, but so-and-so is always…” If the very word “time” has already become a hollow formality to begin with, there’s no need to fret over that sort of thing.

Take Apple, for example. Companies that deal with Apple often say Apple “breaks its promises.” This isn’t about anything in writing; it’s the kind of thing that’s a “verbal promise/schedule.” From a Japanese sensibility, that’s exactly the kind of thing you’d swear firmly to keep, but apparently Apple is different. However, this apparently is also indispensable mud one has to wade through for the sake of a clear output: “making something good.”

Products shelved right after production starts, or parts that don’t get finalized even past the order deadline: that sort of thing is common.

You could make it sound cool by saying both are judgment calls made with the “end customer” in mind.

If, right on the verge of a contract deadline, someone said “hmm, let me think about it a bit more,” a Japanese sensibility might think, “hey, is it really okay to be that easygoing about it?” but if that kind of thinking is, surprisingly, what leads to ultimate success, it might be worth emulating to some degree, and bracing oneself to wade through the mud.

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