In Japan, people like detail. It's an interesting contrast with a more western style of thinking where the approach will to be to paint a broad picture first and follow with the detail later. In Japan, and this is admittedly a generalisation, a tree would be explained from the leaves first and only at the end of the discussion would you hear that it's standing over 200ft tall. You need a good memory to live in Japan as it may take a while before the point of a conversation becomes clear.
This often leads to an interesting discussion when making formal presentations. Western style would be to have minimal information on the slide, three lines of text for example, and then talk through the issue. The Japanese equivalent would be to have every inch of real estate covered with text, diagrams and images. There's nothing wrong with either version, it's simply a matter of tailoring to the audience. Web sites are an good example of this and it's impressive how much information a Japanese web-designer can fit onto the front page.


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