Fortune-Telling With Standard Business Cards
Standard business cards are all the range in Japan. Did you know that? Carrying cards for purposes of introduction has long been a popular custom in that country, not just for salarymen but many other kinds of people as well. In fact, the practice is so commonplace that it’s become quite the stereotype for Japanese people the world over!
The movie “Good Morning” parodies this cultural tendency to substitute meaningless signs and symbols for real conversation and real connections. While set in postwar Japan, the society shown onscreen is a fairly comfortable one and would not seem too much out of place in our own times for the most part. The film is notable for humorously noting such meaningless exchanges of social etiquette, a routine very much related to the practice of trading business cards.
Of course, all human societies revolve around signs and symbols; we are creatures whose first impulse seems to be to indulge in abstract thinking. But the Japanese are justly noted for having taken such instincts to a higher level of development, of formalizing them so much more elaborately than many, to the point that their very language reflects social status by offering alternating forms of address depending on the listener’s place in the greater hierarchy: words will take on different suffixes simply to recognize such social distinctions!
And so today’s practice of trading business cards. It’s the ultimate in getting to know one another in a way that’s really important: one’s relative ranking! This is Japan, after all, a country with a cultural heritage that doesn’t pretend to be egalitarian and so has no qualms about formally identifying people’s social standings.
You could call it a rather militaristic mindset, even. Not one unique in kind to Japan, it must be noted again, but certainly one with few peers elsewhere insofar as degree, intensity, is concerned.
One most conducive to modern business.
Business cards. True, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But so can too little be; so is it possible that important cultural currents are ignored.
Indeed, non-Japanese businessmen and women trade cards all the time as well. In fact, the custom started outside Japan. Yet nowhere else has the practice such force; nowhere else has it become so much a part of the culture.