Standard business cards are all the range in Japan. Does that seem funny? It’s been long observed, since The Eighties if not The Seventies or even before that, how the typical Japanese, and not only the average salaryman, carries around business cards to exchange with people by way of an introduction. In fact, the practice is so commonplace that it’s become quite the stereotype for Japanese people the world over!

The inclination towards using signs and symbols as masks formed the subtext of the hilarious “Good Morning” from director Yasujiro Ozu. While set in postwar Japan, the society shown onscreen is a fairly comfortable one and would not seem too much out of place in our own times for the most part. This was a long time before handing out business cards became a customary greeting on par with the handshake, but the psychological motivations remain the same – as so ably and mostly humorously pointed out by the movie.

It’s true that human beings are naturally drawn to abstractions and thus sign and symbol-making. Yet traditionally in Japan such impulses have achieved a very developed form, such that the very language makes constant use of different suffixes and the like in order to denote social standing between speakers!

And so today’s practice of trading business cards. It’s the ultimate in getting to know one another in a way that’s really important: one’s relative ranking! This is Japan, after all, a country with a cultural heritage that doesn’t pretend to be egalitarian and so has no qualms about formally identifying people’s social standings.

You could call it a rather militaristic mindset, even. It isn’t limited to Japan, of course – at least not in kind, though few other places can match it to the degree of its intensity, the degree of its prevalence and common observation.

One most conducive to modern business.

Business cards. Indeed, much too much could be made of something so straight-forward. Still, there’s enough cause for a consideration: things don’t just happen for no reason at all.

Americans trade business cards quite often, too. Indeed, the practice originated in the West, with Europe and America. Yet nowhere else has the practice such force; nowhere else has it become so much a part of the culture.