Why Japanese Speakers Often Suck at Public Speaking and Why That Might Matter to You
One of the things that consistently impresses me about Americans is their public speaking skill.
By public speaking, I am not referring simply to formal lectures and presentations. For instance, whenever a news reporter asks a random person a question on camera, he or she is most likely capable of answering with a straight face, without hedging, making speech errors, giggling, covering their face, or running away.
I don’t know if I could do the same if I were in that situation. Sure, I could easily stand in front of my class of 300 students and teach, if I had to. I don’t have the fear of public speaking per se. That’s because, if it’s a class, I can premeditate what I may say, I can bring notes with me, and so on. But uttering something moderately coherent off the cuff is very difficult for me, even in my native language, let alone in English.
One of my greatest fears is that, when visiting New York or LA, I run into a crew from one of the late-night talk shows that ask pedestrians super simple questions, like “Can you name 10 books, any books?” “What country did America become independent from in 1776?” and “Who is he? [A picture of Joe Biden].” OK, I am pretty confident I know the answers to these three questions, but I am very ignorant when it comes to almost everything else. In any case, many of those very people who cannot name a single book or our vice president on camera often manage to turn this potentially embarrassing situation into a moment where they can shine, saying something truly funny or witty. This is something Japanese people are not usually skilled at (it may be different in Osaka, the mecca of comedy, though).
And it’s not just the everyday Americans that you bump into on the street who possess this ability. I find highly educated, American scholars are often very witty, too. When I go to conferences, I just marvel at how eloquent people are during the Q&A’s. It’s almost like a competition for who can say the funniest and smartest <insert an expletive> with the most confidence, swag, and seductive smile, whether you are in the audience or at the podium. I don’t know if this kind of intellectual mix-martial arts matches happens outside of conferences held in America. But I am almost certain that most conferences or public lectures that take place in Japan aren’t like that.
It is very much possible to give compelling and smart presentations, public lectures, and product pitches in the Japanese language. It is just that people in Japan tend not to devote enough effort to it. Listen to Japanese politicians and business leaders speak. Zero charisma. And, yes, it takes a lot of effort and practice to be good at public speaking, especially if you grow up in Japan.
Why is this the case?
When it comes to the witty exchanges that take place at conferences, at stores, during TV interviews, etc., I must say that they work because of the culture of appreciating displays of confidence (as long as the confidence is backed up by right qualifications), which is shared by the speaker, the speaker’s interlocuter, and others in the audience. In Japan, you can be the alpha-male CEO of a multi-million-dollar company or the head of a freakin’ ministry but, as long you are publicly engaging in a monologue or dialogue, it is critically important that you sound humble. If you are a smooth-talker, you may risk sounding like a conman. Moreover, in Japanese culture, sounding unsure has the opposite effect of what it does in America: you sound trustworthy and hence more credible. (Humility is valued in the US, too, but appearing confident is equally, if not more, prized).
Speaking Japanese in public also means you have to use the polite register. In English, you inflect the predicate of a sentence depending on many factors, including the tense, as in “I eat breakfast every day” vs. “I ate breakfast yesterday.” In Japanese, you inflect the predicate according to tense/aspect and polarity, etc., but also according to the level of formality and the relationships between (1) your audience, (2) who you are talking about, and (3) yourself. For instance, if I want to say “[A person] ate breakfast,” the verb “ate” can be expressed in at least seven different ways (there are more ways I could possibly list if I wanted to, but I will keep things simple): kutta, tabeta, tabemashita, itadaita, itadakimashita, meshiagatta, or meshiagarimashita. If I am making a public statement, I will use the polite register (those that end with -mashita) and if I or my in-group did the eating, I would use the humble “itadakimashita.” If someone else did the eating, I decide if I should go with the polite “tabemashita” or the honorific “meshiagarimashita,” depending on further factors.
Now, if one has to make an impromptu statement, there is something about the Japanese language (and other SOV languages) that makes that process slightly more mentally tasking than in SVO languages, such as English. That is, you have to project the direction in which your sentence is going, when you have merely uttered the subject. Many Japanese sentences incorporate embedded clauses that delay the mentioning of the main predicate, during which the speaker sometimes forgets how the sentence began. Moreover, in addition to remembering where your goal will be, on your way to the final destination, you have to mark all (or most of) the nouns with appropriate case markers. When I watch Japanese talk shows, I see people making speech errors all the time, which make them sound less coherent. They either miscalculate the trajectory of their utterances or forget what they had said 10 seconds ago, and land on wrong predicates. In Japanese, the last part of a sentence is packed with all the critical linguistic information: tense, formality, honorifics, polarity, transitivity/intransitivity, passive voice/active voice, potentiality, benefactivity, adversativity, etc., so messing up the ending essentially messes up the entire sentence.
To put it differently, in English, you get to say the predicate of the sentence right after the subject. Then, you can insert lots of extra information without postponing the delivery of the most critical part of the sentence. For example, in a sentence like “I bumped into the lady who used to live upstairs from my cousin, Tommy,” the most important information is “I bumped into the lady” and the rest is extra stuff. If you were to say this in Japanese, you have to say “I” (or, omit it if understood from context) and next, “my cousin, Tommy, upstairs, living, the lady” then finally say, “bumped into.”
So, in my opinion, having to worry about sounding humble, using the appropriate speech level, taking into consideration interpersonal relationships between the people you refer to, your audience, and yourself, having to remember where your sentence is going, and wanting to sound less-than-stupid, etc. do not leave enough mental capacity to be witty and playful for a typical Japanese speaker. Of course, sounding cool is not necessarily the objective of verbal communication all the time, especially if it does not develop into a meaningful conversation. It goes without saying that most people prefer a nice, gentle person of few words to someone who goes on and on just to be in the spotlight; that’s a given. But I personally think Japanese speakers can perform so much better in situations by making a few conscious changes.
(1) Invest in non-verbal communication skills, such as body language, facial expressions, purposeful pauses, speaking louder, enunciation, eye contact, etc., that communicate “nice,” “gentle,” “mildly confident,” “honest,” “authentic” to the listener.
(2) Utter the predicate before you forget, and supplement extra information in separate sentences. For instance, instead of saying “I am concerned about A, B, and C,” which requires you to say in Japanese “I, A, B, C, concerned about,” say “I am concerned about three things. They are A, B, and C.”
(3) Use more harmless humor, such as self-deprecation, in public speaking.
And, lastly, I feel that we Americans should be more forgiving of less-than eloquent, less-than self-assured, less-than charismatic speakers. We should not be judgmental towards the people who speak English with a non-standard American/non-European foreign accent. Let us not assume those who don’t use jargon are not smart. Let us not confuse hubris with confidence.
In this regard, my hero is my late mother-in-law, though she never spoke in public or anything like that. But she did speak amazingly. She immigrated from a rural part of Japan to America as a young, working-class woman after WWII. When she and I used to go to shops and restaurants, I saw many employees acting irritated by her imperfect English. But whenever this kind of (insert an expletive) happened, this 4’9’’ elderly lady simply repeated her request or question again and again until those rude employees did something to help her. Damn, she was cooler than any academic who can incorporate a Toni Morrison quote and a Star Wars reference into a remark that neatly inquires the conference presenter about one of the PowerPoint slides shown 10 minutes ago. My mother-in-law did not care about sounding eloquent or impressive—she did not shrink or puff up, not matter who she was speaking to. And that’s the kind of person I aspire to become one day: a badass Japanese woman who speaks her truth.