3) Pragmatic principles and conventions
4.2 Cross-cultural Perspectives
on apologies
admits 'saying you are sorry does not mean you have done something wrong. <shazai no imi de, tsukau baai mo ari-masu keredomo> [video-taped clip of Shiraishi speaking; interrupted before the utterance was completed; $there are some occasions we use it as an apology but we also$, Tanaka's translation]. [Broadcaster continues] I believe that in most cases the phrase "I'm sorry" or "sumimasen" is often used to be diplomatic. People here don't always mean that they are truly sorry, which brings up the question of the sincerity of Japan's recent apologies. Was Prime Minister Miyazawa really sorry when he apologized for questioning Americans' work ethic? A month ago, Japanese Prime Minister Miyazawa visited South Korea and said he was sorry that Korean women had been forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers during World War II, but today the Japanese Foreign Ministry said there would be no compensation at all for those women.
(ABC News, shown on World News Tonight, broadcast by NHK Tokyo, 20 February 1992)
Edward Pilkington, writing in the Guardian newspaper (Don't mention the war, 15 August 1995), comments how strange it is that Japan's war crimes cannot be laid to rest and he argues that this is fuelled by the country's seeming inability to issue an unambivalent apology (e.g. controversy over Japan's war crimes, and apologies for them, surfaced again in August 2006 and in March 2007). Pilkington points out that this is peculiar for a country that thrives on saying sorry, and he quotes Richard Bowring, Professor of Japanese at Cambridge University, on Japanese apologizing behaviour: 'In daily life the Japanese apologise every other sentence. They do it 50 times a minute - it's the way they oil society.'
An article in The Times newspaper (16 August 1995) on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War states that the Japanese language has 'many forms of apology which present a bewildering pattern of complexity to anyone unfamiliar with Japan's culture.' Ten years later, a headline in the same newspaper (16 August 2005) reads 'Leader's apology about war gets lost in translation'. The journalist claims that the Japanese Prime Minister issued two statements to mark the sixtieth anniversary — one that said sorry and one that did not.
Japanese writers also seem to acknowledge such complexities and differences.
Naotsuka (1980), for example, describes American apologizing behaviour (in compari- son with Japanese) as follows:
'I am sorry' - guilty - take responsibility - compensation. Such a system prevents American people from saying 'sorry' as Japanese do. One attacks the other furiously. If not, the other takes advantage of his/her weakness. Being attacked, counterattack.
That's their way.
(Naotsuka 1980: 57, translated byTanaka)
Sugimoto (1998: 254) compared the norms of apology as depicted in American and Japanese etiquette books and manuals and argues as follows:
Etiquette books suggest that Japanese are expected to apologize for actions of a far greater number of people than are U.S. Americans. In U.S. American conduct manuals,
76 Culturally Speaking
people apologize only for their own mistakes, with the exception of women's apologiz- ing for the mishaps of their spouses, young children or pets (. . .)• By contrast, in Japanese conduct manuals, the readers are told to apologize for offenses committed by a greater range of people beyond themselves. In addition to examples of women's apologizing for the mishaps of their husbands (. . .), children (. . .), and pets (. . .), Japanese conduct manuals contain numerous examples of people apologizing for others' misconduct such as: (a) parents' apology for offenses committed by their adult children, in situations such as a car accident ( . . . ) or not keeping in touch with a former school teacher (...); (b) matchmakers' apology to one party for the delay in reply by the other party or for their rejection of the match (. . .) and (c) apology for recommendees' misconduct by those who recommended them for employment, when the recom- mendees quit the job or embezzled the company money.
Takahashi (2005) investigated American and Japanese students' opinions about apologies in criminal cases, and found that more Japanese students than American stu- dents believed the case would not be fully resolved without an apology from the offender. She concludes that Japan would be well suited to a restorative criminal justice system in which one-to-one apologies are used to help achieve a sense of justice.
However, there is often a disparity between people's beliefs and their behaviour. For example, as Sugimoto (1998: 251) points out in relation to her study, it cannot be inferred that people actually apologize according to the norms depicted in etiquette literature; rather, they are better seen as behavioural ideals for a dominant segment of the population. To find out how people actually apologize, we need to turn to linguistic studies.
4.2.2 Linguistic studies of Japanese and English apologies
A number of linguistic studies have explored cultural differences in apologizing behav- iour; for example, Cohen and Olshtain (1981), Olshtain (1989), Vollmer and Olshtain (1989). A range of semantic components for performing apologies have been identified (see Table 2.2), and some differences in frequency of use of the various components have also been found. Several studies have focused on Japanese and English apologies (Barnlund and Yoshioka 1990; Tanaka 1991; Kotani 1997) and have found a number of differences between Japanese and English apologies.
Barnlund and Yoshioka (1990) devised a questionnaire containing 12 scenarios describing offences of varying degrees of severity (e.g. having an accident in a borrowed car and causing minor damage; having an accident in a borrowed car and seriously injuring someone). For each scenario, respondents were asked to select their preferred way of handling the situation from the following 12 options: not say or do anything, explain the situation, apologize ambiguously, apologize non-verbally, casually say'sorry', act helpless, say directly 'I am very sorry', write a letter of apology, apologize directly in several ways and several times, offer to do something for the person, leave or resign a position and commit suicide. 120 Japanese university students and 120 American
university students completed the questionnaire, and the researchers found both simi- larities and differences in the responses. For both groups, the most frequent overall choice was 'say directly "I am very sorry'" (28.7 per cent for the Japanese and 23.3 per cent for the Americans). For the Americans, though, the second-most frequent overall choice was 'explain the situation' (21.5 per cent for the Americans, 12.2 per cent for the Japanese), whereas for the Japanese it was 'do something for the other person' (21.1 per cent for the Japanese, 15.3 per cent for the Americans). On the basis of these question- naire results and accompanying interview data, the authors claim 'the results indicate that Americans seem less comfortable in giving and receiving apologies and tend to prefer less direct and extreme forms of apologizing. The tendency to explain failure rather than admit to it may strike more deeply into the American psyche than it appears to do' (Barnlund and Yoshioka 1990: 204).
Tanaka (1991) used a discourse completion questionnaire (see Chapter 14) to explore apologies in Japanese and Australian English (ten university students for each).
She found that participant relations (social distance and relative power) had a greater effect on Japanese apologizing behaviour than on English; and she also found that the Japanese respondents had a greater tendency to apologize for offences caused by other family members than Australian respondents did.
Kotani (1997) used in-depth interviews to explore Japanese university students' experiences of apologizing behaviour in the United States. She interviewed 15 Japanese students, and found that they did not consider it appropriate to offer lengthy explana- tions in apologies, irrespective of whether the person was at fault or not. They also tended to expect their apologies to be reciprocated or denied by others, rather than be accepted as an admission of responsibility. It would be interesting to carry out a similar study with American students.
All of these studies have identified some differences in apologizing behaviour in Japanese and English. However, some of them have research procedure weaknesses (e.g. Barnlund and Yoshioka (1990) only allowed respondents to choose one option when in reality people might use more than one, and Tanaka (1991) only used a very small number of respondents). So there is clearly a need for much more empirical research in this area. This study is an attempt to add to our understanding of apologiz- ing behaviour in Japanese, British English and Canadian English, focusing on the effect of'personal fault'. We decided to focus on this factor since little linguistic research has been done on this to date, and since the stereotype of Japanese and Western apolo- gizing behaviour suggests that Japanese are more willing to apologize when they are not at fault than westerners are.
A production questionnaire with accompanying rating scales (see the appendix) was used to explore the issue. This enabled us to obtain comparable data in Japan, Britain