Japan: Crossing the Business Communications Divide

Abstract

In October 1982 I was invited to teach Japanese to the managing director of a high‐tech company based in the North West of England. It meant in fact devising a specific 40‐hour course for him from scratch at the Manchester Business School. There were a number of reasons for this necessity. First, there was not (nor is there still) a satisfactory short introductory course on Japanese which caters for businessmen, secondly, Japanese was, in my opinion, not a language that readily lends itself to the so‐called direct method of tuition: hence I had to invent a way of teaching it so that the managing director — I will call him Ted — gained insights into the nature of Japanese as a decidedly non‐European human communication system|2|; further, I had to take account of Ted's own relationships with his agent and his customers in Japan. A final consideration was this: I could scarcely speak a word of Japanese myself!

Citation

Holden, N. (1985), "Japan: Crossing the Business Communications Divide", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 9 No. 3, pp. 9-12. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb014212