Name: Why Yes = No in East Asia ??????
Uploaded: 2025-02-18T15:02:02.000Z
Duration: 19 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This sounds absurd, but it's actually very common in East Asia and core to its culture.

First, East Asians have a pretty extreme aversion to saying no.

Just look at articles like Wordiz listing 16 ways to say no in Japanese without actually ever saying the word.

There are also some long-standing cultural factors in East Asia that make saying yes an accepted way to mean no.

In fact, the rabbit hole goes much deeper than just yes meaning no, so stick until the end if you want to see how far this contradiction goes.

But I know claiming yes equals no sounds crazy, so let's start with some examples, some of which you might actually be familiar with.

Some popular methods as proposed by Yamae are saying no by saying yes.

Yeah, I do need to take care of my frog though.

He's traveling the world right now and I just need to be at home for when he comes back.

In fact, you said yes, but really you mean no.

Yamae says you can also imply no by being really vague or by changing the subject of the question.

Dude, do you ever think about why people go to the clubs though?

Like before dating apps, it feels like people went to the clubs to find a date, but now it just feels like people go there to disassociate.

Or look, you don't even have to entertain them with a response.

All right, at this point, I know someone is thinking, just tell them if you don't want to go.

But that's the whole point of this video.

We're going to look at why saying no is so hard in East Asia, what kind of strategies have evolved given this culture, and how you might be able to tell next time if someone really means the yes they gave you or if they're just saying it.

To start, we have to break down this phenomenon of avoiding no, and it really comes down to two things.

Let's talk about the art of politeness and the importance of face.

Aside from some of us being innate people pleasers, saying no is hard because this response usually contradicts with the expectations of the asker.

No one is ever going to ask for something expecting to be turned down, so they've come to you, and now you have to let them down.

Even if you have a valid reason, saying no can still suck.

How much it sucks though is dependent on a lot of factors, like how close you are with them, what sort of relationship you have, what kind of person they are, the size of the imposition, whether you're turning down a big ask or a small thing, and some other factors that probably have more weight in East Asia, like their rank, are they your senior, are they older than you, and if you are in a position to say no, taking into consideration social hierarchies, expectations, and possible consequences depending on the context.

We'll talk more about these cultural factors later, because this has evolved a lot of the strategies in saying no.

But I want to walk us through what happens when we turn someone down.

Because saying no is an act of refusal, it's also known as a face-threatening act.

You don't want to make someone lose face, or make them feel embarrassed or hurt when you reject an invitation to hang, or reply that you can't help them out with what they're asking.

Because of this, we have to be more considerate in how we deliver our refusals.

This consideration really is just being polite.

In fact, Brown and Levinson defined politeness as a complex system for softening face-threatening acts.

Politeness can range from a simple and direct no thank you, to all those examples we had at the beginning, where no wasn't even mentioned in the response.

In these latter cases, it's a very deliberate way to preserve face for the other person, and it's also very indirect.

These elaborate soft rejections are intricately designed to reflect the other person's age, rank, and seniority, all of which would impact the level of politeness deemed appropriate in East Asian interactions.

This link is highlighted by Cyril as he says,

Politeness is the chief motivation for indirectness.

East Asian societies are also quite hierarchical, and they place a strong emphasis on maintaining group harmony.

Given this context, if you've decided to say no, this decision already kind of upsets the group harmony.

So it's really on you now to express the sentiment in a non-threatening, even flattering way, depending on how senior the other person might be.

Really, you just want to make sure the other person doesn't lose face.

In politeness theory, face can be positive and negative, and this is relevant in any social situation.

Positive face is our desire to be appreciated, validated, and liked.

If you wanted to appeal to this whilst asking for a favor, you could say,

Could you help me with an assignment, please?

You're the smartest in our class, and you know the most on this topic.

Flattery does wonders in appealing to positive face.

Then you have negative face, which concerns our freedom to do what we want.

In order to be considerate of this, when you ask someone for a favor, you could slip in words to make the request seem less of a burden.

Or show that you're being mindful of their time by saying,

In rejecting someone, we can keep in mind the same two basic ones.

You can appeal to positive face by turning down an event saying,

That sounds like it would be a great time.

You can also speak to negative face referring to yourself.

I would lend you money, but I'm in a bind too, so I can't help you.

The next reason for why yes means no has to do with power.

We mentioned East Asia having a more hierarchical structure in society.

So these are cultures which we would say have a high power distance.

Power distance refers to how accepted it is that there will be an unequal distribution of power.

In East Asia, people accept this difference in power as a result of seniority or age, and they will be quite conscious of behaving according to where they are in the hierarchy.

In Japanese, the social norms you would follow in order to be properly polite is called wakimae.

Following wakimae influences how you would speak to someone, which would then naturally include how you refuse someone.

And we can imagine saying no to someone who's higher up in the hierarchy would be harder than saying no to your sibling or friends.

Maciejewski did a study on this as he asked Japanese respondents who they struggled with saying no to the most, and the most common answer was their boss.

In fact, the two respondents who didn't answer with their boss hadn't yet entered the workforce, and they instead said refusing their upperclassmen was the hardest.

One respondent elaborates on this situation.

In a Japanese company, for example, you have to obey your boss.

If I refuse an invitation, I will feel anxiety.

I'm afraid they might not invite me again.

And this anxiety of the consequences from saying no could explain why most Japanese respondents refuse their boss with a response like this.

I'm terribly sorry, but I've made another plan for that day a long time ago.

So I'm very sorry, but I'll have to say no to your wonderful invite.

Compare this to how American respondents would refuse their boss, appealing again to that positive face and beginning with that would be wonderful, before expressing their regret of not being able to make it.

The work culture in Japan with its strong hierarchies, power distance, and emphasis on group harmony could have led to Japanese respondents being more apologetic in turning down their boss, whilst weaker workplace hierarchies and a more equal distribution of power in the West may have allowed American speakers to open more positively and even talk more informally in turning down the same invite.

Soft rejection therefore becomes a life skill in East Asia.

So because of East Asian countries valuing face, prioritizing group harmony, and in having a considerable power distance, you get an environment where yes becomes no and a whole bunch of other refusal strategies to boot.

Here are the 16 ways we had to put forward saying no.

I won't go through all of them, but feel free to pause and take a look.

Although I really think some of these would do more harm than good.

Like if I ever asked someone to hang out and they pulled a number 7 and left the room,

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Why Yes = No in East Asia ??????

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