Hugging

Hugging is common way of greetings in Western culture. But this way is not common in Japan. If we try to hug a woman before we leave, she will reject strongly. If we do this between men, others will consider we are gay.

I think it's because the land of our country is so narrow so we've learned to keep some distance from each other in natural way from ancient times.

We do instead bow, we tend to keep about one metre from each other and tend to repeat bowing. Westerners might think we are playing see-saw.