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Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 23

The claims that Japanese people value and make prevalent use of silence, how-
ever, are mostly not based on empirical findings. Miller (2000) criticises claims
which dichotomise Japanese and American communication styles on the basis of
accounts from personal experiences or collections of observations made by oth-
ers, saying these approaches “do not necessarily describe how speakers actually
use language” (p. 245). Clancy (1986), who conducted quantitative and qualitative
analyses of recorded mother-child interactions in Japanese, may be an exception
in the literature on Japanese silence. Her study however focuses on language so-
cialisation processes of Japanese children and she does not directly address si-
lence in relation to her findings.
A classic and frequently-quoted paper which specifically focuses on the si-
lence of Japanese is by Lebra (1987), but her discussion is based on her “personal
observations and experiences” (p. 343). Thus, there have been remarks on this
popular claim about the silence of Japanese that this “stereotype is hardly accu-
rate” (Anderson 1992: 102). Anderson (1992) further states:
Japanese do talk, and at times they talk a lot. But the contexts in which talk is
culturally sanctioned, and the types of talk that occur in these settings, do not
correspond to those of the West. (p. 102)

Mizutani (1997) makes the same point that contextual factors such as social set-
tings or topics must be taken into consideration when talking about volubility or
silence. Similarly, Miller (1994b) and McCreary (1992) question the stereotypes
of Japanese being ‘silent’ or ‘indirect,’ criticising nihonjinron literature for overem-
phasising the uniqueness of the Japanese by placing Japanese and Americans as
“polar opposites” (Miller 1994b: 52; see also Miller 2000). Miller (1994b) further
argues that “we should specify what the particular situations are in which differ-
ences emerge and matter” (p. 53). Hence, there is a need to identify the nature
of silence in communication in Japan in more specific terms: how are talk and
silence distributed, and in what kind of contexts? Silence needs to be examined
by identifying its forms, meanings and functions in context.

2.6.2 Length of silent pauses in Japanese

Apart from the ‘prevalence’ of silence in social encounters mentioned earlier, at
the level of local management of talk, pause length, tempo of speech, silence as a
communicative act, minimal responses and underelaborated turns appear to be
discussed as characteristics of Japanese silence. In Davies & Ikeno (2002), the fol-
lowing account of silence in Japanese communication can be found: