[steven]

MMM is completely right!

I thought about it for a second.... like what if you just completely shut yourself out from the English speaking world for two months and listened to nothing but Japanese and did a lot of studying. Like, forget about golf, just 100% Japanese. I think that even if you found yourself in that vacuum, you'd still come out no where near the proficiency that you would need for "business" Japanese. Do that for 2 years and you STILL won't have it. That's the brakes. You can force feed yourself from some "business Japanese" type book... I think that wouldn't even do it.

On to golf... really? The big boss is gonna take you out to play golf? That might be one of those things that your boss said just to be friendly. In Japanese there is something called like "aimai", and I think that could be what you are experiencing there. Even if your boss does decide to take you out golfing, it's not like you're gonna have the time to practice to get to a level that you could impress him with in two months! Maybe you should just study the rules a bit so you can tell him what "this" or "that" is in English.

But yea, good luck with this one! Sounds like you're ready for a roller coaster ride!

Advice: get a couple of books. Particularly a book called "Doing business with Japanese Men: A guide for women" (I think that's the title anyways, it'll come up for sure on amazon). Even if you aren't a woman, this book will be SO important. Just trust me on it. It is very light reading, but in the 100-200 pages, you'll learn a buttload about situations that foreigners find themselves in in the Japanese world of business. I'm sure there are plenty of other books, but two books that I had good luck with are called "Communicative Styles of Japanese" and "Japanese Beyond Words: How to walk and talk like a Japanese". These books obviously won't give you mastery of Japanese culture and communication, but will provide a huge amount of important information about stuff that is obvious to japanese but not to westerners. Speaking from experience, knowing how to communicate in Japanese... that is to say how, when, and what to say something (as well as gestures and mannerisms etc) is AS important as the language itself. There's a different rhythm in Japan for conversations. In short, don't just pick up one of those "how to learn japanese in a month" books, start to read about the culture and imagine yourself in the situations that you read about. Learn about what is socially acceptable and not. When you get down to it, you really don't want to come off as rude. They'll respect you a lot more if you aren't rude but you don't know that much Japanese vs you know a lot of Japanese but you are rude (by their standards of course).