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Is Deaf culture universal? This is one of the questions my co-author Tom Holcomb and I addressed in Cultural Detective: Deaf Culture. We concluded that many elements of Deaf culture are indeed found in countries all over the globe. And, national and other cultural differences also make a difference.

I had a chance to check out this hypothesis on a recent trip to Tokyo. Because a book I wrote on intercultural communication for sign language interpreters is widely known, a few lectures were arranged for me. I was looking forward to the last event, a public dialogue with a Deaf woman named Harumi Kimura who is an instructor of Japanese Sign Language (JSL). Ms. Kimura shares her thoughts about Deaf culture on a website that is translated into English by a group of dedicated Red Cross volunteers. It is entitled “Deaf and/or Japanese: My Thoughts on the Language, Culture and Education of the Deaf” and can be found at http://deaf.cocolog-nifty.com/english/

Some of the stories she relates point up the well-known contrast between Deaf people’s more direct way of communicating compared to hearing people’s more indirect style. A woman announces her engagement to a mixed group of Deaf and hearing friends. While the hearing friends murmur general comments of congratulations, the Deaf friends bombard the engaged woman with a string of pointed questions such as, “How did you get to know each other?” “Who proposed?” “What did he say?”

After faithfully reading her website, I was eager to meet Ms. Kimura in person. My excitement was somewhat tempered by the fact that our first meeting would take place in front of an auditorium filled with 100 onlookers and that we would be exchanging observations with the help of a half dozen interpreters.

On the big night of our on-stage dialogue I was sharing bento boxes at Setagaya Fukushi Professional School with the six interpreters who were needed to make the evening’s event possible (two JSL interpreters for Ms. Kimura, two JSL interpreters for the audience, and two spoken Japanese/English interpreters for me). Ms. Kimura was running a bit late. She finally hurried in and scanned the room to locate the person she would be sharing the stage with that night. When she saw me she signed, with some surprise, “ It’s YOU? Hmmm, when I found out an American was coming here, I imagined a very LARGE person, but you are tiny, just like Japanese women!” Then she quickly apologized, and wondered if I had found her remark rude. “Not at all”, I replied with a smile, thinking of the array of personal comments I have been greeted with by American Deaf acquaintances, “I feel quite at home now.”

We were ushered onto the stage in front of the expectant audience of interpreting students and members of the Deaf community. The next two hours sped by as Ms. Kimura and I took turns in responding to a series of questions that had been agreed upon previously.

On the subject of direct/indirect communication, Harumi and I agreed that in our respective countries, Deaf individuals tend to be more direct than their hearing peers. I explained my theory of the “sandwich approach” that American hearing people often employ when giving feedback, where a negative comment is “sandwiched” between two positive comments to make it easier to swallow. Japanese communication style practices a different sort of indirection, often using a “fill in the blank” approach to leave off the critical piece of information.

Harumi told a story about finding errors in a document that a hearing staff member had written. She called the person on the phone and, through an interpreter, asked, “With regard to the errors in the document, should I make the replacement document or would you?” A hearing colleague overheard this phone conversation and said, “Oh, that expression sounded as if you demanded the staff member to make the replacement document.” In Japanese, it should be left at, “With regard to the errors in the document, the replacement should be...”

Even though we found many parallels in the contrasts between Deaf/hearing politeness norms in our two countries, we ended the evening on two sides of a large impasse. I described to the Japanese audience a new technological advancement that has been hailed by Deaf Americans as the greatest boon to communication access. It is called Video Relay Services. Essentially, Deaf people have a web-cam or videophone attached to their computers or TVs. When they need to call a hearing person, to make a doctor’s appointment or order a pizza, for example, they call a national relay service and are connected to a sign language interpreter such as myself who calls the hearing party and interprets the transaction.

Harumi’s reaction was shock at the idea that interpreters she did not know would be able to see into her house. She explained that in Japan the distinction between private space and public space is very strongly felt and expressed doubt that Video Relay Services could ever come to Japan as she thought Deaf people would never be willing to allow strangers to see into the sacred private space of their homes. So despite the many similarities we identified in Deaf/hearing interactions in our two countries, the power exerted by specific cultural values still illuminated the defining differences between us.