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Bowing Incorrectly: Aesthetic Labor and Expert Knowledge in Japanese Business Etiquette Training

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Japanese at Work

Part of the book series: Communicating in Professions and Organizations ((PSPOD))

Abstract

Drawing on participant-observation of five different training courses, this chapter analyzes the ideology and pedagogy of business etiquette training for new employees in Japanese companies. Business etiquette training functions as a multimodal phenomenon in which language, voice, appearance, and movement are standardized through an emphasis on the details of correct form. Such training emphasizes primarily deference politeness (negative politeness) over involvement (positive politeness) with little attention to style shifting. The multi-modal politeness register inculcated through this training communicates both deference to customers and the employee’s own demeanor as a refined person. Politeness behaviors thus become a form of aesthetic labor in which employees’ bodies are appropriated to communicate a desired corporate image.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Wilce and Fenigsen (2016) make a similar distinction between emotion socialization and emotion pedagogy, which involves the self-aware, intentional, and metacommunicatively explicit training of emotion discourse and practice in institutional contexts. See Dunn (2016) for a Japanese example.

  2. 2.

    The classification of Japanese honorific forms is a matter of some controversy (see Wetzel (2004) for an English language overview), and at the time of my study in 2008, the Council for Cultural Affairs had recently issued a new five-way classification scheme (Bunka Shingikai [Council for Cultural Affairs] 2007). One instructor mentioned this and provided students with a Wikipedia article on the topic, but then proceeded to teach the traditional tripartite classification.

  3. 3.

    Abbreviations used in glosses: Distal = distal form, DO = direct object marker; H+ = respect form; H- = humble form; Past = past tense; QM = question maker, Topic = topic marker.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the support of a Professional Development Assignment from the University of Northern Iowa which allowed me to spend the spring of 2008 as a visiting foreign research scholar at the University of Tsukuba. The research was approved by the IRB of the University of Northern Iowa. I would like to thank Risako Ide for serving as my sponsor at the University of Tsukuba and Chihiro Ogura for assistance with transcription. I am grateful to instructors and other employees of the following companies for their gracious cooperation with my research: Do Creation, Green Sun, JAL Academy, Link and Motivation, Pan Nations, and Temp Staff.

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  1. University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, USA

    Cynthia Dickel Dunn

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  1. University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, HI, USA

    Haruko Minegishi Cook

  2. University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith

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Dunn, C.D. (2018). Bowing Incorrectly: Aesthetic Labor and Expert Knowledge in Japanese Business Etiquette Training. In: Cook, H., Shibamoto-Smith, J. (eds) Japanese at Work. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63549-1_2

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