ABSTRACT
Anyone who has dropped into a Japanese karaoke bar late at night—where drunken businessmen, accompanied by pre-recorded background music, croon into a microphone—or anyone who has listened to the interminable speeches at a wedding reception, attended a six-hour faculty meeting, or paid a visit to a clamorous first-grade classroom knows that the “Japanese are silent” stereotype is hardly accurate. Japanese do talk, and at times they talk a lot. But the contexts in which talk is culturally sanctioned, and the types of talk that occur in these settings, do not correspond to those of the West. Just as languages differ in their rules for grammar, cultures have rules for when, where, and how one talks. This is no less true in the university classroom than in other social settings.
