Onet Technologies in Japan #2 – 4/4 – News By Onet Technologies

Episode 4 – Living abroad and discovering the Japanese culture

日本語– Japanese: writing system and pronunciation – Lesson #2

In the first issue of this newsletter, we explained how to pronounce Japanese words by reading the Latin alphabet transcriptions (rōmaji). Since you’re now undoubtedly perfectly at ease with this, let’s increase the difficulty a bit and introduce the “kana” writing system, effectively a phonetic alphabet used by Japanese speakers.

If the “hiragana” writing system is used for several purposes, the “katakana” system is, on the contrary, mostly used for transcribing words of foreign origin and onomatopoeia and making their pronunciation easy for a Japanese audience. The characters used for these two alphabets are completely different and the wannabe speaker will have to learn the 71 characters of each alphabet (46 basic + 25 modified forms, not including the combination of two characters). The katakana symbols have a very unique, geometric look (sharp lines where hiragana is more round and soft) which makes them very easy to spot in a text and it can be quite amusing to guess the meaning of words written in katakana despite having no clue about the rest of a paragraph. Let’s give it a try.

Use this table to guess the following French words.

Here are the punctuation marks:

・is used to separate two words of foreign origin (written Japanese does not use space as a separation between words, whichcanbeconfusingatfirstbutyougetusedtoit)

ー is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is a long vowel

＝ is used as a dash or hyphen in the original language

カフェ・オ・レ

クリームブリュレ

ジャン＝ポール・ベルモンド

Vending machines in Japan

Are you impressed by the pizza or bread vending machines? A Japanese citizen would only give these an indulgent smile, one ordinarily reserved for obsolete machines. Whether in Tokyo or in the middle of nowhere in the countryside, a vending machine is never very far. They are very numerous but also offer a wide selection of products: the most common “models” will let you buy drinks (hot or cold) or snacks, but you’d be forgiven for not being impressed. You’ll surely raise an eyebrow or two when you stumble upon a vending machine for hot food (e.g. hamburgers), frozen food (e.g. an ice cream dispenser on a metro platform), cooking ingredients (e.g. fish broth with a little fish clearly visible in the bottle), baby diapers, toys, batteries, beers, cigarettes and many, many more (and quite often very surprising) items. Below is a photo of a “King’s Treasure Box”, found in the Ueno district in Tokyo. It is a lottery: insert 1,000 Yen (7.5 €) and get a random item, which could be anything from a pair of amusing plastic sunglasses to a videogame console. Zoom in and enjoy the surprising variety of items proposed.

Cultural aspects – Differences to reckon with!

Japan is famous for having relatively unique cultural characteristics, or at least characteristics very different from other cultures, including those which are geographically quite close.

If your mind immediately went to politeness, punctuality or the apparent inability to clearly say “no”, then you are right. However, studying the differences between the French and Japanese cultures also highlights a point on which both cultures could not be farther from each other: reasoning.

While it is less discussed, this point should be taken seriously for two reasons. Firstly, it could be argued that reasoning is quite important for an engineering company! Secondly, such a big issue between the two cultures cannot be solved by removing the language barrier, even with an excellent translation. In order to solve this problem, our thought processes must be modified “at the root” so that the reasonings become more compatible with each other.

French culture can be described as conceptual reasoning with a deductive intellectual process. Conversely, Japanese culture is described as explicit reasoning with an inductive intellectual process.

Summary of these two thought processes – Académie de Paris

You may not realise it, but you use this on a daily basis. For example, you may remember your mathematics lessons from when you were a child where you were first introduced to a theorem, then corollaries deduced from the proof, and finally put these rules in practice and verified them with a bit of homework. Cultures with an inductive thought process would, on the other hand, learn by first being introduced to several case studies introducing new problems each time and then deducing from these the common elements and general rules.

In concrete terms, when developing a technical solution to an engineering problem:

In France: We begin by a wide-scope feasibility study in order to identify the scope of the problem. Then every concept is progressively detailed through preliminary project studies. Manufacturing only begins once a very thorough documentation has been compiled and a final “debugging” is then carried out when the solution has been implemented.
In Japan: Work begins by collecting reports and analyses, the idea being to study a corpus of past case studies dealing with a similar problem. Soon after, the most relevant existing solutions are (experimentally) tested under the new conditions. The following steps include prototyping with a “branching” approach aimed at dealing with the issues or fundamental blocks of the system one at a time in order to ultimately obtain a general solution and its scope.

There isn’t one “good” thought process: it could be compared to connecting two dots A and B with a line, some people will start from A and go to B, some will start from B and go to A. However, sometimes one process appears to be, in the context of a specific issue, more efficient than the other. In order to collaborate with Japanese customers, it is essential for us to adapt as early as the bidding phase and to change our methods during the project phase. Luckily, this also creates opportunities.

Golden rule: When writing for a Japanese client, it really helps to be very explicit. Instead of summarizing ideas, it is better to explain the entire intellectual process and especially better to start with concrete examples instead of concepts.

Japan in symbols – Shiba dogs

Japan is a country full of easily recognisable symbols, some even internationally. Shiba dogs are as loved as the bullet train, the Shinkansen. These little dogs are probably the favourite companion of Japanese people and can often be seen on the streets sporting various accessories: an LED necklace, a tight pink t-shirt, sunglasses

With a graceful and nimble physique and a proud personality, a Shiba dog is also a beloved companion because of its expressive features (making it very photogenic). It is also quite the barker, with a twist: these dogs can seem to “scream” with what can sometimes only be qualified as “exaggerated drama” (here’s for instance an example of such theatrics at the vet: video).

Our business reports traditionally use a red/orange/green light in order to symbolise bad, average or good results. A new, fresh take on this feature could be to use the Shiba dogs’ expressive face to create 5 levels of satisfaction.