Last month,
, the “Real Gaijin”, had an interesting post titled "Even in Japan, the Customer is Not Always Right". It was about customer harassment and the measures some Japanese companies are taking to cope with it.It reminded me of a piece of research that is now a few decades old, but the findings of which I believe still hold true today – perhaps even more so than when they were first published. Cross-cultural communication researchers Noriko Tanaka, Helen Spencer-Oatey, and Ellen Cray set out to investigate how Japanese, British, and Canadians apologize in two different types of situations: one in which a person complaining is actually at fault, and another in which the source of the complaint is external. The research is a chapter in the book “Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication, and Politeness Theory,” edited by Spencer-Oatey.
The researchers administered a questionnaire that describes eight scenarios to university students in each of the three countries. After each scenario, the respondents were asked to fill in what they would say. The eight scenarios consisted of four pairs of related situations. In one, the annoyed person is in fact in the wrong, and in the other the malcontent is not to blame but neither is the person being complained to.
Here is an example of one of the sets of paired scenarios. If you’d like, you can imagine what you would say before reading the results of the researchers’ investigation.
1. You are working in the Customer Service section of a department store. The telephone rings, and a customer complains that his goods have not been delivered yet. The purchase order is in front of you, and you see that he signed for the goods to be delivered tomorrow morning. The customer says in an annoyed tone:
I bought a table from your store yesterday. You were supposed to deliver it this morning, but it’s 12:30 now, and it hasn’t arrived. What has happened?
You say:
2. You are working in the Customer Service section of a department store. The telephone rings, and a customer complains that his goods have not been delivered yet. You know that there was a traffic accident near your warehouse, and the road from your warehouse was closed for several hours. The customer says in an annoyed tone:
I bought a table from your store yesterday. You were supposed to deliver it this morning, but it’s 12:30 now, and it hasn’t arrived. What has happened?
You say:
The researchers analyzed the English and Japanese responses in terms of the frequencies of 1) an explicit expression of apology, like “I’m sorry”; 2) a statement admitting responsibility (ex. “That’s our fault”), rejecting responsibility (such as, “Actually, sir, you signed for the goods to be delivered tomorrow”, or alluding to responsibility in an indeterminate way (for instance, “That’s strange, sir. It says here that it was to be delivered tomorrow morning. There must have been some sort of misunderstanding”); and 3) an effort aimed at problem management, such as reassuring the complainer (“It will get there soon”) or offering to try to rectify the situation (“I’ll see if I can get them to deliver it this afternoon.”)
Apology frequencies
Of these three analyses, this first one related to a clear expression of apology rendered the most divergent and surprising results: Across the eight scenarios, the Japanese respondents were much less likely to apologize if the complainer was at fault compared to their cultural counterparts in Canada and the UK. Only 22% of the Japanese responses included an apology, compared to 41% of the British and 35% of the Canadians. When external circumstances were to blame, though, the Japanese apologized slightly more: 64% compared to 58% of the British and 59% of the Canadians.
Responsibility frequencies
In the responsibility coding, the results across the cultural groups were more similar. Almost no one admitted responsibility either when the complainer was to blame or outside forces. Instead, they made expressions of indeterminate responsibility when the adverse situation was out of the control of either them or the complainer, with percentages ranging from 88% to 91%. Likewise, roughly half of each group (48%-57%) made ambiguous expressions of responsibility when it was the complainer’s fault. Similar frequencies across cultural groups were also seen for clearly rejecting responsibility when the complainer was to blame, with frequencies from 33% to 38%. For me, there was a slight frisson of curiosity in the finding that while 4% of Canadians and 5% of British respondents rejected responsibility when the issue was of external origin, only 1% of the Japanese did. While the percentages are low for all the groups, it suggests the Japanese participants were nevertheless more unlikely to completely reject accountability for a situation related to outside factors.
Problem management frequencies
In both the complainer-to-blame and the outside-forces-to-blame scenarios, the Japanese respondents were also the least likely to try to manage the problem. When the complainer was at fault, only 11% of the Japanese respondents included statements that tried to fix the problem in any way, compared to 27% of the British and 29% of the Canadians, and although such statement increased somewhat when external circumstances were the cause, still only 19% of the Japanese had statements that dealt with problem management, lower than the 25% of the British and 41% of the Canadians that did so.
These findings seem to contradict the common image of Japanese people as being quick to apologize and super-solicitous. But Japan is a culture that believes in the proper adherence to policies and principles. As such, it may draw the line at unwarranted whiners — and I’m not sorry about that one bit.
Wild. Wonder how this would go down in the US. No, wait, I don't.
First of all, thanks for referencing my earlier post.
You have certainly provided a scholarly explanation of how Japanese people tend to deal with incidents of customer harassment.
While it is always a challenge to describe an entire country as having a reputation for poor customer service, for example, I have heard that certain non-English speaking countries are notorious for less than stellar after-sale service. It would, therefore, be interesting to see if similar results could be obtained from the following list of places with such a reputation:
France: Probably perceived as dismissive and possibly too direct.
Germany: Probably seen as too "by the book." There may be a similarity to Japan.
Russia: Probably considered as rude.
I could be way off on these perceptions, but a cultural comparison would be interesting to study.