Be very careful if you are planning to do business with Japanese people !

If you’re planning to do business with Japanese people, be very careful.

A Japanese who looks very honest, helpful and friendly in daily life might behave very differently in business. A person who always talks about honesty and straightness in his daily life can easily lie and decieve in business. Of course we can not generalize this to all people in Japan, but unfortunately this is a very common problem I have faced many times during my 15 years stay in Japan.

The biggest problem is that when they lie, they do it so professionally that it takes some time to understand it and most of the time it is too late to counteract. As a person who worked in many international companies and laboratories with many people from different countries, Japanese people have always been the most difficult to understand their behaviour. They don’t usually look as they actually are. When you are talking to a Japanese person you are actually talking with his public-face which usually smiles and uses very polite words. If you see the same person somewhere else with his real-face, an internal business meeting for example, you can’t believe that he is the same person. Polite words are replaced with short offensive words, smiling faces are replaced with strained and serious faces.

In my opinition, having two different faces is one of  the main reasons of high level of depression and high rate of suicides in Japan. I will not go into details in this post. You can ask the following question then: Why do they have two different faces?

It is the topic of another blog, or you can comment here if you have any ideas, or if you think that Japanese people are usually very straight and easy to understand.

You can see my other posts about Japan in http://english.youshare.jp  (English SNS in Japan)

My blog about Venture Business in Japan is HERE.