Gifting and Cultural Differences

Do you usually buy gifts for your colleagues or friends during business trips? And would that change the relationship? An in-depth look at the way we go about Japanese and American business practices

Ben Ogawa was an American corporate worker for a major Japanese company in New York. He was assigned a five-day business trip to Tokyo to examine the trends in the recent foreign visa program.  It was his first business trip to Japan, and many of his colleagues gave him the utmost advice and wished him the best of luck. His boss, a stout man with a neatly parted stream of salt and pepper hair, who was an expat himself, told him.

“Don’t bother getting me a gift,” he patted Ben’s back.

Whereupon Ben, who exuded a positive reputation at work,  followed his words and got on the plane the next day with a crackling, new suit and tie. Sitting in business class made him feel rich and important. Staring out the window, seeing himself above the cotton candy-esque clouds, he believed everything was going in the right place at the right time.

His work went swimmingly in Japan, and everything ended up the way he expected. He networked with a few employees, and had a light drink with them at Shinjuku at the end of the day. Boy am I going to get a promotion when my boss sees these results, he thought.

On his last day, he wandered around Haneda Airport to kill some time for his flight. The gate was surrounded by dozens of Japanese sweets, from Kit-Kat’s to Tokyo Bananas, among other various rice crackers and snacks. At that point, he thought it’d be nice to get a box of sweets for his wife, who was fond of them. Hoping to surprise and pamper her, he bought a box and subsequently headed to the lounge for a beer while staring at the busy airfield. 

Back at the office since the trip, everyone greeted him and welcomed him back. By the end of the day, his boss called him to his office, and asked him with a curious smile.

“You actually didn’t bring a gift for me?”

“No, sir,” said Ben. “You told me not to.”

“Well I’ll be damned. That was a joke, Ben-san!”

And that was when Ben realized the difficulties in understanding the mind of the Japanese. When modesty took on a whole new level, when no sometimes meant yes, and vice versa. When it was encouraged to come back with a gift for your work on a business trip and tell them it’s a whole bunch of nothing special when it was. Business was business, he thought—not a vacation. A stream of sweat started to trail down along his temple. Surely, he was of Japanese ancestry, but he was raised here all his life. I didn’t know, sir, was all he said, whereupon his boss patted his arm aggressively with the same smile he made before his trip.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “After all, we’re in America, no? We shouldn’t just assume.”

“Actually, I…” Ben spoke.

“Go on.”

“Ah, it’s nothing, sir.”

BACK at home, he saw his wife had already opened the box of Tokyo Bananas. After all, it was hers, and the smile she gave when he gave it to her would remain like seeing the remnants of the flash after a picture. She was a total keeper for most things as she was raised an only child anyway. It was a culture clash like no other—he’d think over all the times at work he saw colleagues bow to each other, exchange business cards carefully as if they were delicate relics from the past, implement horenso* rather than work independently, and work until their seniors left. He questioned whether he would ever get to catch up with the way Japanese do business. And he questioned whether he would ever understand the Japanese way of modesty, of gifting.

Ben resumed to do what he believed was right, while respecting his current workplace culture. He was under the clouds, now, with a lot to learn in order to soar back up.

*Horenso: An idealized method to ensure smooth communication in Japanese business, first coined by Tomiji Yamazaki. The word is an acronym: Ho 報告 (to report), Ren 連絡 (to inform); So 相談 (to consult).