NEW DELHI: Just like many Asian countries, Japanese bowing お辞儀 (ojigi) is a significant way of greetings and a fundamental part of social etiquettes in Japan. The Japanese people in their country of origin or world-over – wherever they travel or reside, practice bowing to show respect, and greet others.
From everyday greetings to business meetings to funerals, ojigi is ubiquitous in Japanese society and the ability to bow correctly and elegantly is widely considered to be one of the defining qualities of adulthood.
And many non-Japanese people who interact with Japanese for various reasons learn how to bow, and tend to reciprocate bowing in the best possible manner to show their respect to Japanese and their culture.
However, it is very important for the non-Japanese to learn exactly how and when one should bow while interacting with Japanese in business or otherwise to ensure cordial relations and better going with them, either in Japan or anywhere in the world.
Though there no clear definition for the angles of the bowing exists, however, people tend to bend the waist like 5, 15 and 30 degrees. It seems that these angles are perceived as normal in daily life among Japanese.
When you see your friends or acquaintances and if you want to send your greeting intention, you may bend to bow at 5 degrees and when you greet to your known person with seemingly lower positioned people or younger people, you may bend about 15 degrees.
Full bowing of 30 degrees can be used for the senior person or to the unknown person to you.
Important things are:
1) not to bend your neck, but to keep straight spine line from the waist to head, the bending point is your waist.
2) And don’t make too short and repeated bending movement like the chicken, but the bowing posture movement shall be elegant and beautiful.
3) Don’t gaze at the eyes of your speaking partner. It is regarded as impolite. Your eyes’ focus points need to be right angle against your straight line from the waist – spine –head.
There is a special bow angle of 45 degrees, however, it should be only used for the absolutely highest-ranking people or for the case, when you want to express 100% apologize to your wrongdoing.
Japanese also needs to understand the Indian greeting manner, humbly, I think.
For us, Japanese, the horizontal and round movement of the head from side to side by Indian is not understandable without the prior explanation. For us, the positive sign is the nodding of the head movement is usually vertical and the Indian way of head nod is mysterious.
I understand this side to side movement can connote both deep and shallow agreement according to the context. But for the usual Japanese in Japan, who have not met Indian before would surely misunderstand and we tend to assume that the Indian persons are showing the sign of non-accordance, whereas actually, the Indian person is sending positive sign whether it is strong or not to us.
Let us take care of each other and be accommodative.
(The author of this article Yukihiko YAMADA, is the Japanese national from Hamamatsu city. He has been living and working in India for over a decade, and is M.A. of German literature and linguistics in Japan and Germany. Having worked in Commercial and Investment Banking in European banks and also experienced in manufacturing engineering in JMNC, Yamada is now engaged in the business consulting area. He is representative, Japan Desk of KrayMan Consultants LLP, and is promoting medium and small Japanese companies to come to India. KrayMan Consultants specializes in the field of accounting, taxation and business consulting.)
