What Got You the Room in London Won't Keep It in Tokyo

I have spent almost 12 years working in the Japanese market, 10 of them inside Japanese corporations. That time has shaped how I think about leadership more than anything else in my career. One topic I particularly like to research is executive presence and how differently it shows up depending on where in the world you are.

Most writing on this topic treat it as a universal thing, like there is one playbook everyone should follow. After working across cultures for over a decade, I realized this is not exactly how it works and in this article will analyze it based on my own experiences.

EP is the ability to make people respect you, to portray a competent image so that your opinion actually gets taken seriously.

A senior position might get you in the room, but it does not guarantee any of that. I have sat across from people where it was clear their age or tenure was the only reason they were there. They had the title but somehow you could feel they did not really have the room. Nobody was leaning in or particularly engaged. The gap between having a position and actually commanding respect is what EP is really about.

Generally, EP can be divided in 3 areas:

Whether people take you seriously. This comes from how you make decisions, how consistent you are, and whether people sense you actually mean what you say.

Not just public speaking. How you run a meeting, what you do when you are not talking, and whether people feel heard after a conversation with you.

How you show up, how polished you look, and what your digital presence says about you before anyone has even met you in person.

These three matter. But after a decade inside Japanese companies, watching leaders succeed and fail across very different cultural environments, I would add a fourth, which might me more important than the other three.

EP is not a fixed standard. It is defined by the people around you and the context you are operating in.

In most Western corporate environments I have seen presence built through visibility. Speaking up, taking clear positions, projecting confidence. The room rewards people who fill space and speak with certain air of authority.

However, by living and working in Japan, I realized story is a bit different here.

Below area values that would be crucial to develop EP in Japan, but not necessarily might be important in other cultures:

In most Western meeting rooms, silence is uncomfortable. People rush to fill it. In Japan it is the opposite. Ma is the deliberate use of pause and empty space, and it signals that you are thinking seriously before you speak.

A well placed silence in a Japanese meeting room carries more authority than a confident answer delivered too quickly. I have seen Western professionals talk themselves out of credibility simply by being unable to sit with a moment of quiet. Learning to be comfortable with Ma is one of the first and hardest adjustments for anyone coming from a Western professional environment.

In Western cultures humility is often seen as a soft trait, nice to have but not particularly linked to authority. In Japan it is structural.

Kenson, the practice of humility and self-deprecation, is how you signal that you understand your place within a relationship and within a hierarchy. Presenting yourself as the smartest person in the room, speaking about your own achievements openly, or positioning yourself above others, even subtly, will quietly destroy your credibility.

The leaders I saw command the most respect in Japan were often the ones who deflected credit, acknowledged others first, and never made their own status the point of the conversation.

Literally translated it means reading the air. In practice it means being able to sense what is happening in a room without anyone saying it out loud. What the group is feeling, what has not been said but needs to be acknowledged, whether the moment is right to push forward or to pull back.

During my time in Japan I came to realize how important this skill can be. More than one time I have heard colleagues saying this like for example: “Ah, Tanaka-san, yes he is good, but he still needs to improve his air reading skills when meeting with clients”.

Japanese professionals spend years developing this skill and it is treated as a serious indicator of emotional and social intelligence. In a Western context we sometimes call this reading the room, but in Japan it goes much deeper. Missing these signals, pushing through when the room has already decided, or failing to notice discomfort that nobody is voicing, are some of the most common mistakes I watched Western executives make.

In Western environments consensus can feel slow. Why spend weeks aligning everyone when a decision can be made in a meeting? In Japan consensus is not bureaucracy. It is the foundation that makes execution possible.

Nemawashi refers to the process of quietly laying the groundwork before a formal decision, talking to stakeholders individually, understanding concerns in advance, building alignment before anyone sits down in the same room.

By the time a decision gets made formally, everyone already knows what is coming and has had the chance to shape it. Leaders who skip this process and try to push decisions through in the room are seen as careless at best, and arrogant at worst. The most effective leaders I worked with in Japan had already done the real work before the meeting even started.

In my time working in Japan, I have watched confident, capable Western executives walk into Japanese boardrooms and lose the room completely, not because they lacked skill, but because they were showing the wrong version of presence. Loud where quiet was expected. Decisive where patience was the signal or direct where indirectness was the language.

I have also watched much quieter leaders hold a room of senior Japanese executives simply by knowing when to stop talking.

Neither style is wrong. But only one works in a given room, and I learned that from experience.

You cannot self-assess this one. EP lives in the perception of others, and what you think you project and what people actually receive can be very different things.

Ask the people around you, but ask the right question. Not a generic “how am I doing” because that gets you nothing. Ask how they feel after a meeting with you. Whether they leave with clarity or still unsure. Whether they felt listened to or like you were just waiting for your turn to speak.

One honest answer to that is worth more than any framework.

And if you are working across cultures, how you gather that feedback is itself cultural. In Japan, nobody will tell you directly that you misread the room. I had to build relationships where honesty could eventually come through, and learn to pay attention to what was not being said as much as what was.