Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context

19 Misinformation and Media in Global Context

217 19 Misinformation and Media in Global Context Potential cross-cultural communication problems may be caused not by cultural differences per se, but by the process of information transmission. Consider the powerful role the media play in selecting , manipulating, and reporting information they find newsworthy . A minor mistake in translating from Japanese into English or vice versa, for example, can sometimes cause serious damage to Japan–U.S. public relations. With the near-instantaneous dissemination capabilities of modern information technology, news about Japan spreads like wildfire. And the media play a decisive role in portraying the image of Japan abroad. One example of media-manipulated misinformation that contributed negatively to the Japan–U.S. relationship in early 1992 concerned former Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa’s statement made in the Lower-House Budget Committee on February 3, 1992. Miyazawa’s commentary on the U.S. labor force, taken out of context , misinformed the world through international news networks, including the Associated Press and United Press International. My discussion incorporates Hiroshi Andoo’s (1992) study of this issue. The lead sentence of the Associated Press news release of February 3, 1992, read as follows: “In Japan’s latest rebuke to its U.S. economic rival, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa told Parliament Monday that Americans were losing their work ethic and the drive ‘to live by the sweat of their brow.’ ” The quotation that was featured in the media, “Americans lack the work ethic,” made sensational headlines in the United States. A very different picture 218 Japanese Communication in Global Context emerges from a careful examination of exactly what the former prime minister said in Japanese that day, however. The image of the “arrogant” and “ethnocentric” Japanese that this piece of news portrayed seems unjustified. The former prime minister was criticizing business practices of the 1980s, both Japanese and American. Miyazawa lamented that in the United States many college graduates chose to work on Wall Street. As a result, the number of capable engineers had decreased. In addition, Miyazawa summarized the dangers of the accelerated U.S. money-market economy, where investors without substantial personal resources were involved in junk bonds and leveraged buyouts . He continued his litany of worries with the observation that, as far as the U.S. economy of the last ten years or so was concerned, he had felt for some time that there was a palpable lack of the work ethic in America. But he did not stop there. Miyazawa continued by stating that Japan’s bubble economy also had involved a weakening of the work ethic. He pointed out that both Japan and the United States suffered from the consequences of the 1980s, but he thought that the experience could turn out to be a lesson from which all Japanese could learn. The particular sentence—and the most controversial one—that the Associated Press presumably quoted comes next. Miyazawa stated, “After all, it is important to create value by sweating on one’s forehead.” This particular sentence has no grammatical subject. In the immediately preceding clause, the word kokumin zentai ‘every citizen of the country’—normally translated as the Japanese people —is inserted as the subject. In the clause preceding this, Miyazawa chooses the word otagai ‘we both,’ which clearly refers to both Japan and the United States. It is possible to interpret kokumin zentai either as (1) the Japanese, or (2) both the Japanese and the Americans. It is, however, impossible to interpret the term as Americans alone. The translator committed a fundamental error by choosing the only impossible interpretation. The media turned it into an accusation: Americans are “lazy”; Japanese are not. It is not clear to me whether the error and its consequent worldwide dissemination resulted from the interpreter’s ignorance, from the media’s desire to report the sensational, or from a deliberate action on the part of those who wanted to encourage two-way “bashing”— first, the Japanese bashing Americans for being lazy, and in turn Americans bashing Japanese for being arrogant. Misinformation and Media in Global Context 219 Most Americans were (and are) completely unaware that the former prime minister’s remark was taken out of context. The discourse in which the remark was made, as discussed above, was about American business culture in general, with a theme that had been frequently voiced by Americans themselves. The former prime minister criticized the Japanese business situation of the 1980s as...