Kate Elwood looks at the interesting concept of "companionable silence" in her column Cultural Conundrums-which I think is largely absent from western culture:
Applied linguist Ikuko Nakane notes that descriptions of the "silent Japanese" are often based on anecdotes rather than carefully assembled evidence. Certainly, many Japanese people are highly verbal and some might be considered garrulous. As in all communication, much depends on the specifics regarding the interlocutors, topic, setting, and so on. Yet it is telling that the criticism urusai (noisy) is extremely prevalent in Japan in a variety of situations, while equivalent disparagement related to talking too much tends to be reserved in the United States for circumstances in which someone spills the beans. On the other hand, those who are quiet are more likely to receive condemnation as aloof or even surly. A "companionable silence" is considered positive, but more often than not such wordless-together time is limited to only a very small number of companions indeed. It is a (pleasant) exception to the social norm of interaction in a way that it is not in Japanese society.
Language researchers have often focused on the functions of silence, for example, as a negotiating technique, a face-saving strategy, or a means to convey attentiveness and respect. But as in the case of Ghibli's Pod, a lot of times people are quiet for no specific purpose and not because they have been "reduced to silence." In the interestingly titled chapter "Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Silence: Talking as a Cultural Practice" (in Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies edited by Richard Shweder, Martha Minow, and Hazel Markus), cultural psychologists Kim Hee Jung and Hazel Markus argue that the values attached to talking and non-talking are culture-specific and that silence should not be categorized unthinkingly as problematic.
As is often the case, the cultural training starts young. Linguist Masahiko Minami has investigated the narrative discourse of young children, and maternal elicitation of these narratives, among Japanese families in Japan, Japanese families in the United States, and American families. He found that the American children made approximately 2.11 utterances per turn. The turn length of the Japanese children in Japan and the United States, on the other hand, was about the same, averaging 1.22 utterances per turn.
One reason for the shorter turns among the Japanese children appeared to be the Japanese mothers' tendency to insert comments to show attentiveness, while the American mothers appeared to encourage more monologic turns. Minami further found that both the American mothers and the Japanese mothers in the United States made significantly more requests for description from the children than the Japanese mothers in Japan did. The children in the United States accordingly appear to have learned to speak at greater length and embellish in more depth.
Americans are often uncomfortable with silences for two reasons. First, they may find it hard to interpret the meaning of the silence, and assign inappropriately negative significance to it. Additionally, they may be at a loss as to what to do in response to the non-talk. For many, following suit and similarly falling silent is a deeply ingrained no-no. On the other hand, one-sided dominance of the conversation is an onerous burden.
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