Imagine a hypothetical situation where I was a nonchalant Sociology major staying at a hall in NUS and a group of Japanese college students arrived for exchange. Since they were going to take the same modules as me, I was assigned to take care of their every need. At first thought, communicating interculturally with Japanese college students should be an easy task. They were of the same age and there would be no generation gap. Furthermore, they should be able to converse in fluent English and should know about Singapore culture. I was so wrong. They spoke little English, mostly conversing among themselves in Japanese, and communicating with me using hand signals and facial expressions, which were often misinterpreted by me.

When they came knocking on my door for the first time, they bowed to me and gave me a cute Japanese diary. That was nice of them. I said thanks and went back to my computer game.

Throughout the semester, as I knew that my lecturers always waited till 15 minutes after the actual start time of the lecture to begin their boring speeches, I always brought them to lectures 10 minutes late. This made them extremely unhappy, and I thought they were just being weird.

Thinking back, I should have read up on Japanese culture before they arrived. This would have informed me of their social customs of bowing as a greeting and giving gifts at our first encounter. I would have then prepared a gift in return and returned the bow. I would also have known about the importance of punctuality to them and made it a point to bring them early for lectures. With a higher level of cultural self-awareness, I would also have been more alert and empathetic of their nonverbal cues and been a better host.