Call for better understanding

Press, 24 December 1985, Page 10

Call for better understanding

ALAN GOODALL

By

of NZ.J.N.

A Tokyo psychologist who went to New Zealand to study the culture shocks that await the unwary Japanese tourist has himself returned home shaken.

Not by the alleged bad manners, but by newspaper reporting. Mr Nobuaki Kuniya found his mission of better understanding appearing in print as a criticism of businesslike New Zealand abruptness.

“I was so surprised to read the report about a Japanese saying New Zealanders are abrupt,” he said yesterday in perfect English. “What I wanted to communicate to the newspaper reporter was that there are subtle differences between the hospitality of Japan and New Zealand.”

But what appeared in print was Kuniya-san being quoted as saying Japanese complain of long, unexplained waiting times at restaurants, shops and hotel reception desks. A psychotherapist specialising in family counselling, Mr Kuniya is maintaining his professional cool now that he is back in Tokyo. Yet it is plain that he still wants to get across his message to New Zealand tour operators and the public who come into contact with Japanese visitors. The New Zealand Government Tourist Office in Tokyo, eyeing the 25 per cent growth in the number of free-spending Japanese coming this year, is just as anxious that he succeeds. The tourist office is so happy about the “appreci-ate-Japanese” tourist seminars he gave in Auckland and Christchurch recently that it is talking of inviting him back next year.

Mr David Lynch, New Zealand’s chief tourism promoter in Tokyo, said one of the positive benefits from the Kuniya visit was that Japanese-speaking guides bad formeo a professional group to upgrade the ser-: vice.

“All the news of New Zealand-Japan tourism is positive,” said Mr Lynch. “Japan has become our third overseas destination after Australia and the United States, and Japanese tourists going down will again increase this year, by at least 20 per cent” But for Mr Kuniya, the news was bad. At least in newspapers. Among tourism operatives, he believes he got the message across, with subtlety. “I am not criticising New Zealand,” he said. “I am not demanding New Zealanders compromise themselves or S retend to be nice to all apanese tourists. “But I emphasise that mutual understanding, a 5050 approach, brings mutual benefits.”

Mr Kuniya conceded that Japanese tourists may at times appear to New Zealanders to be demanding, arrogant, and nationalistic.

But they came from a different culture, one that had not been as exposed for so long to international standards as the Western culture.

Amae, or the pervasive mother care reflected in Japanese symbiotic relationships, might well be studied by tour operators seeking to understand their guests, he said. Mr Kuniya said he had heard Japanese visitors say that Japanese girls married to New Zealanders and acting as guides had lost their demureness and become too businesslike.

This showed that Japanese going abroad for the