Page 40 - Silence in Intercultural Communication

Chapter 2. A review of silence in intercultural communication 27

However, following Brown & Levinson’s (1987) framework, this avoidance strat-
egy falls into the category of ‘Don’t do the FTA’ strategy, where the performance of
the act of, for example, disagreement, is abandoned. Whichever the case, it seems
that silence is used extensively as a politeness strategy by the Japanese, and that
such use of silence may cause intercultural misunderstanding. However, it should
be mentioned that long silent pauses in the position of second pair parts are likely
to be interpreted as prefaces to dispreferred seconds or even as the dispreferred
seconds themselves, as we have seen in the example from Levinson (1983) in Sec-
tion 2.2.1. Thus, one could say that silence in place of disagreement or rejection is
not a communicative behaviour particularly unique to Japanese people. It could
be what happens after the silence itself which causes puzzlement to non-Japanese.
For example, McCreary’s (1986) example of silence as a dispreferred second in
Japanese-American business negotiation is followed by another adjacency pair
in which the Japanese negotiator responds with the preferred ‘yes’ without re-
ally meaning to ‘agree’ but only indicating that he is attending to his American
negotiator’s suggestion. Therefore, caution needs to be exercised in identifying
what silences are ‘doing’ in relation to the contexts in which they occur. It should
also be mentioned that the theory that confrontation is avoided in Japanese is not
always the case. Miller (1994a) shows that confrontation and argument do take
place in Japan, but in private rather than public. Similarly, Ueda (1974) reports
that the direct use of ‘no’ is likely to be found at home with family members and
not in public social situations outside home.

2.6.4 Distribution of talk and silence

Regarding the distribution of talk and silence, there are a number of claims that
the hierarchical structure of the society is reflected in the use of silence (Beebe
& Takahashi 1989; Kunihiro 1975; Lebra 1987; Nakane 1970). Watanabe’s (1993)
study of Japanese and American group discussions also makes a contribution to
this issue. However, as Lebra (1987) and Beebe & Takahashi (1989) explain, si-
lence can either serve the superior in asserting power or the inferior in demon-
strating deference, depending on the context. Another dimension in which talk
and silence can be distributed is the private-public continuum. It has been fre-
quently mentioned that the Japanese make a clear distinction between in-groups
‘uchi’ and out-groups ‘soto’ and accommodate their social behaviour according-
ly (Loveday 1982; Moeran 1988), and that relatively more silence is likely to be
observed in communication in an out-group context than in an in-group con-
text such as among family members, close friends or business allies with whom