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I probably didn't state that quite right. He probably knows (intellectually) that you don't care. Japanese buisiness people know that Americans don't...
Peter T. Breuer
He's likely english. A non-native speaker would take more care to write something that makes sense. And a person who can write (in whatever...
*You* may think you don't have a problem, but unless you speak that particular asian language or understand the issues with tone you'll *never* pronounce 'chen' or 'yao' properly. Western spelling of asian words has no way of conveying tone and so cannot acurately represent the pronouciation of the word. That's why zhang, chang, chung, xian etc are different spellings of the *same* word. Of course this is made worse in trying to spell things in different western languages: trying to spell 'chang' so that a French-Italian-Danish person could pronounce it the same is near on impossible!
You mention Russian below and western script also has problems here as, for example, Boris Yeltsin is spelled Elstin in French and Poutin is Poutine (as the 'English' spelling means something very different in French! ;-) ).
I think this is to do with the cultural aspects of not losing 'face'. Us westerners aren't overly bothered by embarrbutting situations, but asians are acutely aware of them and avoid them at all costs. Hence why there is no direct translation of the word 'no' in Japanese (as in the opposite of yes) - there just are different ways of implying no without actually saying it.
The only reason we don't have the same problem is that English is the lingua franca of the global community.