Making it Work: A Study of Australian Expatriate Language and Cultural Strategies for the Workplace in Japan

Australia has maintained a steady and strong business relationship with Japan for over three decades. In fact, Japan ranks first in terms of important export markets1 for Australia. As a result, it can be assumed that, on a micro-level, the possibility of more expatriates from Australia being stationed in Japan will increase to facilitate business communication and transactions between Australian and Japanese companies. With the creation of multinational workplaces, including Australians and Japanese working together in Japan, comes an increasing necessity for Australian expatriates to have linguistic and cultural competence. While this has been identified in intercultural communication research2, the implementations of such findings related to Japanese language proficiency and how it benefits Australian-Japanese workplace communication is seemingly sporadic despite the investment into Japanese language education by Australia.