In general, Japanese people do not express their feelings much with their facial expressions or any gestures. They rather tend to hide their emotions and try to speak less loudly. However, on the other hand, gestures and facial emotions seem to play a very important role for English speakers. It is certain that you can see the difference of their way of speaking as soon as you watch some videos of Japanese and English speakers speaking.

Personally, I take videos of myself when I practice speaking English so that I can check my pronunciation and grammar. Surprisingly, I found that I used a lot of gestures even though I usually do not use gestures when speaking Japanese. I became so interested in why this phenomenon happened and tried to figure it out.

I have two ideas about this phenomenon. The first idea is that I used gestures to relieve my stress. People are likely to move their fingers, touch their hair and blink quickly when they are nervous. It is easy to think that the phenomenon can be categorized as these actions. Second one is that because English is a language with a stress accent, it is, to some extent, easier to use gestures than when speaking Japanese which has a pitch accent that focuses on the pitch of sounds.

There are some more other possible reasons, but the national character could have something to do with this topic. Thus, comparing Japanese people with people from other Asian countries will show differences and lead us to find other elements that make our way of speaking different.