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Japanese Communication

There are continuous heated discussions among English-Japanese researchers across countries about how English to Japanese advertising works. Time and again, new models are developed. The assumption that the way advertising works may be related to American or Japanese culture is rarely included. Because the United States has a longer research history than other coun-tries, its methods and styles are often used in cross-cultural advertising research, including research on advertising in Japan and Japanese translation. As a result, a characteristic of most studies is their "Americanness." Hypotheses are based on American assumptions, not Japanese assumptions, and research methodology is based on American conventions and philosophies of how advertising works. This is the ethnocentric approach. American concepts do not necessarily explain how Japanese translation, German translation, French translation in France, and Spanish American translation works for advertising.


Diverse thinking patterns make advertising people think differently about how advertising works. Defining advertising primarily as "persuasive communication," for example, is typical of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual style, but it is not a universal way of thinking. The concept of persuasive communication, ubiquitous in American textbooks, and not so in Japanese textbooks, has not become a core concept in Dutch advertising translation theory either, although it is used in advertising effectiveness research by multinationals. The persuasion and "hard sell" models are specifically American. They are too often used as the basis for explaining how advertising works in other cultures. An example of such cultural blindness is asking "how the persuasive process is supposed to work at the individual level in Japan."


Persuasiveness is not an ingredient of Japanese advertising, and the collectivistic nature of Japanese culture hardly includes an "effect at the individual level." Categorizing advertising according to hard sell versus soft sell is part of the American framework but is not practiced solely by American researchers. In fact, the practice is also adopted by researchers in other cultures where it does not apply.

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