The linguist Toyama (1992) has argued that speakers of English use an ‘introduction-oriented’ style of communication where key points are stated upfront, while speakers of Japanese use a ‘conclusion-oriented’ style where key points are left to the end. In my study of group-internal American and Japanese bank meetings, I found that American managers were ‘introduction-oriented’ in so far as they confronted business matters upfront, discussing ‘done’ deals and conclusive points first, and less conclusive deals and points later. Likewise, Japanese managers were ‘conclusion-oriented’ in so far as they tended to focus on tested points and topics that included and integrated meeting members first, reserving the more controversial topics of business for later.

Americans and Japanese organise their communication differently because of different goals in meeting management. The American goal is to manage business tasks at hand, whereas the Japanese goal is to manage the on-going relationship among colleagues. Following in the theoretical framework of interactional sociolinguistics begun by Gumperz (1982) and extended by Tannen (1984), my argument concludes that the American focus on tasks and the Japanese focus on relationships prevail because each group of managers has a different interactional goal. The Americans aim to achieve independence through explicit communication, while the Japanese aim to achieve interdependence through communication that aims to distance talk from the interaction.

Both the American task-driven organisation and the Japanese relationship-driven organisation have a logic of their own. But cross- and inter- cultural research (see for example, the seminal studies of Gumperz 1982; Kochman 1981; Scollon and Scollon 1981; Tannen 1984) shows that differences in conversational organisation create misunderstandings and fuel negative stereotypes. For example, the Japanese executives in the meeting examined here begin their conversation with what Graham and Sano (1984) call ‘nontask sounding’, talk that serves to sound out participants’ positions prior to a discussion of business matters. This initial sounding-out aims to establish the cohesiveness of the group, to confirm goodwill among meeting members and is essential to the organising of Japanese meetings. However, nontask sounding is often misinterpreted in inter-cultural communication as pointless small talk that only provides irrelevant or old information. Worse still, its lengthiness is often misunderstood as a Japanese stalling tactic. American executives waiting for the ‘real business’ to begin may find themselves doubting whether or not their Japanese counterparts genuinely want to do business.