No, I don’t want to beat up Trump over this. Its understandable he is new at this, and maybe he just wanted to make sure the photographers all got a good shot of the ceremonial handshake. I.e., it really was no big deal. But it does point out some interesting cultural points that perhaps someone should have briefed him on. Americans are culturally naive. They have trouble understanding not everyone is exactly like them, so they tend to be surprised and even disappointed in others a lot. Foreigners pick up on this, and interpret it as arrogance and conceit. All that talk about exceptionalism doesn’t help much either.

Americans are taught young and early that it is absolutely essential to have a “firm” handshake. Heaven forbid that your handshake be thought of as weak, or “limp”. You have to grip the other guy’s hand and squeeze it hard and long. If you don’t, it somehow means you’re a wuss, a pansy, weak. This is especially true in the business world where the handshake has such a ceremonial and ritual value.

Not everyone is brought up this way. I was taught that a handshake should be gentle and brief, nothing to be withheld or denied but something to be gotten over with as quickly as possible. No one sat me down and explained it to me, I just picked up on it as a kid. When a grown-up shook your hand, you quickly learned how long and how strong. Its one of the millions of little things that define a culture, and Americans, for a variety of reasons, seem to be oblivious to these subtleties. I picked up on this very young, not because I’m smarter or wiser than anyone else, but because I was from another culture than the mainstream one I was surrounded by. I was more attuned to these cultural differences and quickly learned to spot them and adapt. There are a million things to learn, how close to stand to someone when you talk, how often and under what circumstances you can touch them, the tone of your voice, eye contact, posture, I could go on. And you get really good at it, not just in modifying your own behavior, but spotting it in the behavior of others.

It works both ways, of course. The Japanese people live in crowded conditions, in close proximity to many others, so they are not afraid of accidental human contact with strangers. But perhaps because of that, they do have a strong sense of etiquette and strict boundaries of personal space, it is not to be violated deliberately. The Trump handshake would have been interpreted as pushy and intrusive, an unnecessary and impolite familiarity, a violation of body privacy. Now if the PM was educated abroad, or had extensive contact with foreigners, or otherwise was aware of these differences, he probably would make allowances for it. Still, 19 seconds…?