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Meaning and Context: Asian Cultures vs. Others

Asking people of different cultures to define a word like pleasure leads to long sentences and explanations, which suggests that it has different connotations and translations in different cultures. Because it is frequently used in advertising, understanding its meaning and connotations in other cultures is important. In Japan, pleasure is a personal feeling of pleasure, related only to the inner circle. The Spanish concept of "placer" reflects a wide variety of feelings of social and inner enjoyment.

The concept of friendship is ambiguous. It does not exist in Japanese society. It is known and used because it is an often encountered American word, but those whom you call your friends are basically members of the inner circle. True friend­ship is made to mean "understanding how to communicate." This is very different from the North American concept of friendship, in which you can make friends and lose friends. In the Japanese outer circle, you have no friends. Rarely might you find a new friend in your work. As a result, asking Japanese respondents to choose the degree of importance of true friendship is a nonsense question. Japanese cannot express the importance of true friendship. This also holds true in China and in other collectivistic cultures, though more strongly in some than in others.

Americans call people friends who are merely acquaintances in the European context. In continental Europe, only close friends are on a first-name basis. Dealing with everybody on a first-name basis, as the Americans do, confuses the friendship concept. It is particularly confusing to Germans, for whom the wider usage of the word friendship is too ambiguous, as is illustrated by the reaction to a Newsweek article about service:

Germans, like most Europeans, are more distant with customers than Americans are used to, but can hardly be summed up as unfriendly. The artificial friendliness commonly practiced by shop assistants and restaurant staff in America would be off-putting to Germans. Who wants to be on a first-name basis with a waiter who'll be forgotten promptly after the meal? Many Western, abstract concepts are beyond understanding to the Japanese and other Asian cultures. In particular, those that are remote from daily life, such as a "world at peace" or striving for "quality of life," are concepts they have difficulty coping with. Most East Asians can better handle pragmatic, down-to-earth think­ing. This implies that even the basic notion of a "concept" is not familiar to their way of thinking. Peace, not the large concept of peace, but peace nearby, means health, safety, and having good people around you.

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