Although it's good to realise "you can't tell people anything", it's also good to be aware that "people can't tell you anything". As in: you're (and I'm) probably not exceptionally special, so we should take into account that we're probably not able to grasp the full picture when someone describes us something, and thus might do well toning down some of our inherent reflexive scepticism sometimes.
This is something I wish people would do when trying to grasp gender and sexuality, especially where it's outside a binary. Too many attack helicopter jokes and "bi people are untrustworthy", not enough trying to understand another person's experience.
I reverse this when dealing with religious people, for example. I don't understand where they're coming from, and I draw hard lines for those with beliefs that are harmful to me, but I understand them better than when I was an edgy atheist teen.
For example, their server ran on five (not four, not six, five) Fujitsu A60 minicomputers, and became hopelessly bogged down after about 80 concurrent users. We were never able to get a clear picture of why. We asked lots of questions and they’d try to answer them, but none of the explanations made any sense that we could puzzle out. They were trying to tell us, you see, but you can’t tell people anything.
Yes, I liked that part, but thought it got de-emphasised a bit when it continued on to say that they didn't really understand the architecture themselves. In this case, I'm sure that played a large role in the Japanese not being able to tell them.
It's not that the Japanese couldn't communicate in English.
It's the fact the Japanese felt, like Asians generally do, they shouldn't disrespect their partner by saying what the partner said seemed liked gobledycook to them.
So the Japanese internalized the failure to understand and eventually did things the way the knew...
Somewhat related: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes