COLUMN ONE : Japanese Learning to Just Say No : Bucking a tradition of ambiguity, people are trying to more definitively disagree--at home and at the negotiating table.

The year was 1969. President Richard Nixon asked Prime Minister Eisaku Sato to impose quotas on textile exports in exchange for the return of Okinawa. Sato used a notoriously ambiguous phrase-- “Zensho shimasu” --which can be translated as “I’ll take a proper step,” or “I’ll take a favorable action,” but often means rejection.

Sato later denied promising quotas, and Nixon spent more than two years bludgeoning Japan into accepting them. The incident severely damaged U.S.-Japan relations.

The Japanese reluctance to give a clear, definitive no has confused countless other foreigners and snarled international interactions, from casual chats to trade talks.

The ambiguity of the Japanese no is so famous that President Clinton, at a dinner last year in Vancouver, Canada, with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, scribbled this advice to him: “When the Japanese say yes, they mean no.”

But times are changing. Five years after flamboyant legislator Shintaro Ishihara urged his nation to stand up to Washington in his controversial book, “The Japan That Can Say No,” Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa did just that by resoundingly rejecting U.S. demands for measurable trade targets in his recent summit meeting with Clinton in Washington.

There was no hemming or hawing in the language Japanese negotiators used to reject the proposed targets. They said, “ Totei doi dekimasen ,” or “There is no way I can agree with that,” according to translator Mariko Nagai, who has worked on dozens of U.S.-Japan trade negotiations.

“I was a bit scared about interpreting it, because the language was so clear,” Nagai said. She said she has seen a trend toward sharper language among Japanese negotiators in recent years.

Hosokawa’s definitive no to Clinton, widely applauded here as a sign of Japan’s coming of age, symbolizes a shift away from the soft, indirect expressions that Japanese have long used to maintain harmony and save face with one another. As contact with foreigners increases and the tradition that frowns on direct expression weakens, more Japanese are learning to speak more clearly and daring to disagree--in daily life as well as in the international arena.

Assertiveness seminars and debate training are being imported from the West and gaining popularity--especially among women. Debating skills are being formally promoted in the classroom for the first time by the Ministry of Education, whose centralized curricula have focused on rote memorization rather than on self-expression.

Consumers are being encouraged to say no to high prices and sales pressure tactics. One Tokyo consumer service center has launched a campaign to promote “the courage to say no” to salespeople.

The mass media are weighing in with such articles as “Become an Employee Who Can Say NO.” “The yesman is being weeded out,” declared Spa, a trendy men’s magazine. “. . . If you can’t clearly communicate your will, you won’t win in business.”

Such blunt advice bucks centuries of communication techniques designed to soften denials with subtlety and understatement, by providing hints and relying on the other person to intuitively fathom the real meaning.

(Certainly, blunt speech has always existed in Japan--clear orders by the boss to the underling, or many husbands to their wives, for example. But to casual friends and other acquaintances, Japanese have often spoken obliquely.)

No one knows why such subtleties of speech developed. The prevailing theory is that they sprang from a need for people to get along in this crowded island nation. Another common explanation is the Confucian system of hierarchical human relations, which makes it difficult for subordinates to say no not only in Japan but also in such countries as Korea.

Kikuo Nomoto, a Japanese language expert, said the nation’s long history of repressive rule, from the feudalism of the Tokugawa Shogunate to the militarism of the early to mid-1900s, also stifled expression.

“The feudal government did not permit criticism, so people developed techniques to hide their real feelings,” Nomoto said.

The influence of politics on expression is particularly apparent in the Kyoto area, experts say. Some Kyoto phrases carry completely different meanings from their surface appearance. To be asked to stay for dinner, for instance, actually means “Please go home.” Many Tokyoites say Kyoto expressions are the most difficult to understand in all of Japan.

Kyoto Women’s University Prof. Kazumasa Hoshino explained that Kyoto was the seat of government and center of imperial rule for more than 1,000 years. To protect themselves from the many changes of government and to avoid making enemies, people learned to cloak their language in niceties and used extreme caution in admitting people into their inner circles, he said.

Even today, many first-class restaurants in Kyoto won’t serve first-time visitors without an introduction from a regular customer. The unwitting visitor will merely be told that all seats are filled.

The most provocative theory about the reluctance to say no comes from Yoshimi Ishikawa, a novelist and social commentator. He says many Japanese avoid giving a clear yes and no because they lack certain absolute values.

“Westerners have . . . the law of the Bible. In Japan, our god has been our emperor, who has never given us any absolute laws. All he says is, ‘ Ah, so? ‘ (‘Is that so?’)

“When our absolute value is ‘Ah so,’ how can we say yes or no?” Ishikawa said.

Such patterns of communication will not be transformed overnight. But sheer necessity is fostering some change.

Nori Shikata learned to say no as a high school exchange student with a Midwestern farm family in the early 1980s. Before going to the United States, he was told that saying no clearly--declining a party invitation, for instance--would avoid misunderstandings and not offend Americans.

Shikata, who went on to become a bureaucrat, said directness was the most difficult thing he had to learn in the United States. But now he can state his views on any number of issues--and Japan is producing more people like him. The number of exchange students going abroad grew to 185,888 in 1990 from 23,149 in 1980.

Exchange students return to Japan with a remarkable ability to speak their minds, said Junko Kawano of the AFS Japan Assn. exchange program. Although they have to readjust to Japanese society, causing initial hardship, the end result is that more people can maneuver in both foreign and Japanese situations.

Training in debate is not limited to those who go overseas. On a recent morning at the Ichikawa City Elementary School in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba, the second-grade class of Junko Sakuma took an adventure in the art of debate with this topic: Do dogs or cats make better pets?

Forget about tiptoeing around another person’s feelings. The verbal jousting was fierce, said a recent account in Aera magazine.

The cat side: “Cats have fluffy fur and are cute.”

The dog side: “But not all cats are fluffy!”

The cat side: “Dogs bark and make a racket.”

The dog side: “But if you train them, they’ll be OK!”

Such classroom debates are spreading, thanks to the Ministry of Education’s new directive to encourage self-expression and foster debate skills.

Teachers were first instructed to place priority on speaking skills in a 1989 ministry directive: “In this era of internationalization, it is necessary for children to express their own ideas themselves and communicate them to others.”

In 1992, newly issued sixth-grade textbooks contained the first-ever instruction in rhetorical skills: a lesson called “Let’s Debate!” Beginning next month, high school students will be able to fulfill an oral communication requirement with a debate class.

More universities too are using debate as a teaching technique. Keio University Prof. Atsushi Kusano, who employs it in his class on modern Japanese politics, said more people are becoming accustomed to debate through Western news shows beamed here, such as the “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and Cable News Network.

He also said people are becoming frustrated with the government’s reliance on foreign pressure to enact domestic changes and want to debate the issues and decide their policies for themselves. That attitude is exemplified by politicians such as Ichiro Ozawa, one of the key leaders of the Hosokawa coalition government.

In business as well, debate and assertiveness training are gaining converts. Tsutomu Hamaoka, a manager for the Fuji Photo Film Co., began teaching debate skills to his department last year.

Hamaoka said the exercises of tallying up pros versus cons, or using a devil’s advocate to provoke deeper thought, may seem routine to Westerners but is radical stuff to many Japanese. Many decisions rely more on “feeling” or “intuition” than hardheaded logic, he said. Although Westerners are able to separate attacks on their ideas from attacks on them personally, Japanese find that difficult and thus shun confrontation, he said.

“There is no cultural parallel to the devil’s advocate in Japan,” said Michihiro Matsumoto, president of the Management Development Institute, which sponsors debate training seminars. “Japanese feel that if you disagree with their theories, you are disagreeing with their personalities.”

To overcome that feeling, debate trainees are told they are merely playing a role unrelated to their true selves.

Assertiveness training is perhaps even more subversive than are debate lessons. Self-assertion has long been frowned upon as selfish--and American--in a society that requires conformism.

Now such seminars are in demand by everyone from homemakers to corporate managers, said Noriko Hiraki, a social science professor at Japan Women’s University. She runs seminars privately and for the Psycho Technology Institute of Japan, which has tripled the number of seminars and doubled the size of classes since its first workshop 10 years ago but still has waiting lists.

Ten years ago, many of her clients wanted to learn assertiveness because they were being transferred abroad. Nowadays, she said, most of the demand is for teaching Japanese to speak more assertively to other Japanese.

Hiraki said the old form of ishin denshin, or tacit communication, in which both sides know what the other means without being direct, is breaking down. Managers are also feeling a growing generation gap with younger people, who are less intimidated by seniority.

“Nowadays, if you ask your young staff members to go out for a drink after work, they’ll say they have other plans,” said Fuji’s Hamaoka, 53. “When I started out 30 years ago, we would change our plans.”

Nomoto, the language specialist, said young people are losing the ability to understand established code phrases for no--such as “I’ll think about it.” “They come back a week later and ask if you’ve thought about it,” he said.

Shinobu Omiya, a 30-year-old office worker for a publishing firm, said her generation still ponders excuses before saying no but doesn’t really seem to need the crutch anymore. But some say this is more a product of bad manners than of increased self-confidence.

Women are the most conspicuous recruits in the move to learn to say no. Hiraki said 70% of her students are female. At one Keio University debate last year, all the captains of the 10 debate teams in Kusano’s class were women.

For women conditioned to just say yes, Hiraki’s lessons have brought small but significant triumphs: the homemaker who said no to a persistent newspaper salesperson for the first time in her life; the woman who finally declined a friend’s invitation to eat at a restaurant she didn’t enjoy; the wife who told her husband she really wanted to take a bath when he called for a ride.

Nozomi Yokoyama, 28, and Kazuko Oura, 26, recently took debate lessons. Learning the skills of cool, objective analysis will help their careers, they said.

Arata Sato, a Keio University student in environmental studies, said Japanese will continue to speak more softly than Westerners but that the era of compliance and unvoiced opinions is ending.

“More women want to continue work after marriage or having children, and we have to debate this with our husbands and bosses,” she said. “Unless we have our own clear way of thinking and can explain it skillfully, we won’t be persuasive.”

Researcher Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.

Some Hidden Meanings

Different responses in Japanese and what they really mean:

PHRASE: Kekko desu. LITERAL MEANING: I’m fine. OFTEN MEANS: No, thank you. (I’ve had enough.) or I’d love some more. Please ask me again.

PHRASE: Kangaete okimasu. LITERAL MEANING: I’ll think about it. OFTEN MEANS: Don’t hold your breath

PHRASE: Muzukashii desu ne. LITERAL MEANING: It is difficult to do that. OFTEN MEANS: It’s impossible.

PHRASE: Doryoku shimasu. LITERAL MEANING: I’ll try OFTEN MEANS: Forget it.

PHRASE: Zensho shimasu. LITERAL MEANING: I’ll take a proper step. OFTEN MEANS: I won’ have anything to do with that anymore.