Direct Strategies 3
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Popular belief has it that Japanese prefer indirect communication styles. However,
these claims seem to be overgeneralized, and lack adequate empirical evidence. Is it reasonable
to claim that Japanese are consistently indirect, regardless of who the interaction other is, and
regardless of the situation? The questions of when, and to whom indirectness is exercised
remain to be sufficiently probed. This study focuses on the relational variable of intimacy, as
well as the contextual variable of interaction situation, in examining the preference of direct and
indirect strategies of the Japanese.
Problems in extracting the expected cultural traits of Japanese samples have been
raised quite often as of late (Matsumoto, 1999; Matsumoto, Kudoh, & Takeuchi, 1996; Takai,
1998; Takano & Osaka, 1999). There are various studies in the communication field which had
failed to confirm the more popular sociotypes of Japanese (Dunn & Cowan, 1993; Gudykunst,
Matsumoto, Ting-Toomey, Nishida, Kim, and Heyman, 1996; Neulip & Hazelton, 1985;
Miyamoto-Tanaka & Bell, 1996; Steil & Hillman, 1994), and these unexpected results have been
attributed mainly to changes in Japanese culture (e.g., Leung & Iwawaki, 1988). Matsumoto
(1999), on the other hand, claims that these anomalies are due to problems with either the
theoretical framework on which cultural predictions are made, or with the methodological design
of the studies, and not so much with changes in the Japanese people. Siding with Matsumoto’s
speculations, this study assumes that methodological considerations can successfully tap into the
underlying Japanese patterns of communication behavior, which traditional methods often fall
short to accomplish.
Convention