Understanding Other Cultures: What Books Should You Read?

I've often been asked for recommendations in terms of books about cross-cultural issues. It's one of those things, though: there's a lot out there, but I only some of it is genuinely useful. Business professionals are often drawn to books that are strictly about cross-cultural business, but those same business readers would be surprised to find very useful insights from books that weren't written with that audience in mind. In this post, I'll give you a couple of brief examples. I'm going to use the terms "Japanese culture", "Chinese culture", and "Italian culture" here, but one should realize that these are just terms of convenience — no culture is monolithic. Moreover, although I'm using the word "culture", more precisely what I'm talk about is modes of thinking...

Japanese Culture
There are lots of books about Japanese culture, but you'll get some of the most subtle insights from a work of fiction -- yes, fiction. Read it on the airplane on that long flight to Tokyo: The Counterfeiter and Other Stories by Yasushi Inoue. It's not a new book, but the stories -- especially "The Counterfeiter" — reveal a lot about Japanese emotions and occasional bent towards irrational thinking (yes — every culture has that...).

A wonderful non-fiction work about Japan is Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto. Again, it's NOT a business book, and in fact, it's a narrative about a romantic venture. But it captures precisely the cross-cultural pitfalls of those who think they've got Japanese culture figured out...

Chinese Culture
When I was living in Asia, I was desperate for some good books about Chinese thinking. There are books — some good and some bad, and despite China's growing importance it still seems that there are fewer books about Chinese thinking than about Japanese thinking — but none seemed to be what I was looking for. I ended up stumbling upon a medical text called The Psychology of the Chinese People, edited by Michael Harris Bond, a lecturer in psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. This work provides precise and thoughtful studies of Chinese social behavior, personality, values, and ethics that are invaluable to anyone engaged in business or negotation with Chinese people in Mainland China, Singapore, or elsewhere.

Italian Culture
Italian culture is one of those cultures lots of people in the West think they understand because it's European, and so "must be close to us". But as I'll point out in a later post, sometimes even the closest cultures can be quite different (the U.S. and Canada being one of the best examples of this) in subtle and interesting ways. The themes of identity, reality, and ennui in Luigi Pirandello's stories capture some very important aspects of Italian thinking and ways of viewing the world; check out Luigi Pirandello, Short Stories: Selected, Translated and with an Introduction by Frederick May.

None of these books are new, but they're better than new: they're timeless...