After using the first dimension called “power distance” in the model of Hofstede, the following can be said: The Japanese business culture is based on the power distance, tending to be big, maybe not large, but big. The subordinates usually expect to be informed about their activities on a daily basis. Older people in the Japanese culture are both respected and, in some cases, feared. The U.S. business culture has a substantially smaller power distance, considering the cultural peculiarities of American society. According to the ideas and concepts used in the second postulate called “uncertainty avoidance,” the Japanese business culture has considerably strong uncertainty avoidance, unlike the U.S. business culture. The Japanese employees have issues with changing jobs, for example, and they do not quit their jobs even if they do not like them. The U.S. employees have no problems with changing workplace if something is not right, not to mention the degree of acceptable chaos at the workplace, not imaginable in the Japanese companies.
The Individualism and Collectivism concepts are strong and weak in the U.S. business environment, respectively, and vice versa in the Japanese one. The Japanese workers are focused on harmony at the workplace; people work in clans, exchanging individualism for loyalty. Femininity and Masculinity are distributed equally for both cultures, but Japanese tend to be more masculinity-oriented. As for Long-Term versus Short-Term Orientations, also known as Confucian Work dynamism, the Japanese work environment tends to be long-term oriented, being persistent, motivated, and dedicated, while the U.S. counterpart is short-term oriented. Finally, in terms of indulgence and restrained concepts of Hofstede’s model, the Japanese culture tends to be more restrained than indulgent, considering the approaches of both people to such activities as leisure, freedom of speech, happiness, birth rate, and others.