Seeing Eye-to-Eye with Japan

I had been told many times that Japanese people do not like to make eye contact, but it was not until recently, while teaching a course at my university on making academic presentations in English, that the truth of this cultural difference really hit home. You see, I had never really tried to teach this sort of thing before (i.e. giving advice such as “please look at your audience!”), and I found it a more difficult task than I had originally imagined it to be. On top of that, I returned to the US during my summer holiday and was able to observe, firsthand, how the two cultures differ in this respect.

In the book The Inscrutable Japanese, by Kagawa Hiroshi (Kodansha Bilingual, 1997), the author notes that if Japanese children, when scolded, look their parents in the eye, they will be further reproached, “Why are you looking at me that way?” In contrast, if an American child looks down or away when chastised, he or she will most likely be ordered to “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” Kagawa goes on to speculate about the possible reasons for this difference in behavior, such as Japan’s feudal class system in which commoners could be struck down by samurai for making eye contact, or the Confucian hierarchical social structure which even today governs, to some extent, relations between “superiors” and “inferiors.”

In any case, getting my students to look up from their papers, or to tear their eyes away from the screens on which their visual aids were being projected, was a daunting challenge. “Don’t talk to the screen” and “don’t simply read” were probably the two most common phrases I employed while they were practicing—and no matter how many times I repeated myself, there was always this strange, latent impulse to look down, away to the side, or off into space among the Japanese. Students from other countries, however, had less difficulty and often corrected their behavior rather quickly if they were told to “maintain eye contact.”

While I was on vacation in the US, however, I noticed right away that people were looking directly at me. I transferred planes in Detroit airport, and I cannot tell you how many times I mistakenly thought that passersby were about to speak to me. It was truly strange to experience so many people making direct eye contact like that—and I must have looked even stranger, being that I kept smiling, nodding, and even bowing to them! I was a bit dazed from the flight, having not been able to sleep at all on the way over, and when I almost bumped into an enormous man exiting the men’s room, I bowed, looked at the ground, and said, “sumimasen.” He looked at me as if I were insane! Rightly so, I suppose.

Perhaps when speaking with Japanese people, foreigners should limit making eye contact, as Kagawa advises in his book. I have noticed that making direct eye contact makes people rather squeamish and uncomfortable, and in business I suppose that having your clients or partners relax would be best. Though in the US, for example, direct eye contact is seen in a positive light—denoting honesty, sincerity, self-confidence, and trustworthiness—in Japan it can be taken as proof of vanity, hubris, overconfidence, and rudeness. There are even situations where such “eyeballing” can be downright confrontational, and if you watch Japanese television I think you will see ample proof of this—staring as a prelude to violence—particularly in comedy shows or dramas centering on schoolchildren. Not to mention Sumo wrestling, where the “stare-down” is perhaps the most important component of the match!

When I first arrived in Japan and began teaching English, I learned to limit making gestures while talking with Japanese people—“speaking with my hands,” as it were, which was a deeply ingrained habit—by actually sitting on my hands. I had noticed my students staring at my hands, rather than my face, while I was talking to them, and I suppose that I was gesticulating wildly—at times, even dangerously, I would imagine, by Japanese standards. After all, many of them must have thought I was either insane or threatening them with violence! You can imagine the impression I first made, speaking with a thick “New Yawk” accent, waving my hands all over the place, and staring them all down like that. I shudder to think of it, actually.

At any rate, I learned to speak in a more neutral, dialect-free or unaccented English (though, even today, if I try to say, for example, “Coffee Talk with Paul Baldwin,” which was the name of an old Saturday Night Live skit with Mike Myers, it is a dead giveaway); and I successfully trained myself to keep my hand gestures to a minimum, so I suppose that limiting direct eye contact is something that I can also learn to adjust. I would advise others to do the same—though not when making presentations, please!