Intercultural Communication Studies XV: 1 2006 McHugh Japanese Ominous Cultural Encounters

This paper looks at four ways to convey cross-cultural information in typically the academic context. First, an overview presents these four common approaches, which are the multicultural, the monocultural, the bicultural, and the experiential approach. The main part of this paper then demonstrates the experiential approach with most of its citations referring to the Japanese culture. This exercise builds the learners ’ personal involvement by forcing them to decide on a response to each cross-cultural encounter. Learners make choices by bringing to bear the totality of their background knowledge, their personal experiences, and their powers of intuition. In E. T. Hall’s (1981a; 1981b; 1982) pioneering work, that eventually evolved into the field of intercultural communications, he identified and explained cultural behavioral patterns, beliefs, values, attitudes and certain innate notions related to time, space, and silence. Hall’s literary style may be considered a multicultural approach since he collected examples from several, autonomous culture groups and even from ethnic groups within the United States to elucidate the cultural elements under examination. In the same vein, Stewart and Bennet (1991) categorized mainstream American values by comparing thoughts and actions to those present or absent in other culture groups. Some authors (Naotsuka & Sakamoto, 1981; Sakamoto & Naotsuka, 1982