I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.
English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.
I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.
> It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
When I was a student I took some classes in English, and some in my native language. Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging. Even if you're a fluent speaker it's still a foreign language, so it's a mental hurdle. I can compare it to talking to a friend in a casual setting vs having a work meeting.
> He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather".
It's a trait of hierarchical societies. Questioning your superior is a bigger threat to the society than saying things that are objectively wrong.
While it's a fair argument that English became the lingua franca and if you don't speak it, you will be left behind, I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
> those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
I feel like there's almost the reverse stereotype of this for Americans living in Japan. Like, that they're weirdly obsessed with Japanese culture and try too hard to become more Japanese.
I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory.
If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
That's probably most of it, but the way Japan typically teaches English is sort of notoriously bad. That probably doesn't help either.
> If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle.
You do see some Japanese companies talking up the need for English competency; I suppose if more and more companies there use English competency as one thing they're looking for in job applicants, that might cause a shift elsewhere, as suddenly there's a 'need' (and thus a motivation).
That is my experience with Brazil as well, it is very uncommon to find people who speak good english there in part because nobody ever travels outside the country.
Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.
Thank you for the kind words! I am glad to hear that you found that book useful.
The editor and I did discuss a sequel and I started collecting material for it, but I had changed careers by that point and no longer had the time or motivation to see it through to completion. And now I’m not sure if there’s a market for such books anymore. At least, if I were learning to read Japanese myself now, rather than buying a book of annotated readings I would choose my own texts and ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about the parts I don’t understand.
Proficient English is just a “plus-alpha”, as they say.
You don’t need it, but it might open up a few more doors.
Then there’s certain topics, like science/medicine where English to some extent is absolutely necessary to keep up with research. Even then, I find some of these people still struggle with speaking and listening, but reading and writing can be pretty solid.
> The notion of “fairness” dominates English education policy in Japan. Because of the importance of educational credentials in Japanese life, any policy that seems to favor one group or another—the rich, the urban, children with highly-educated parents, or children who happen to have acquired English fluency on their own—will attract popular opposition.
I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.
I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.
Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.
Not really, there's little to almost no difference in English literacy between Viet, Korea & China. Yet there's a big gap compare to Japan, the reason is either culture and economic incentive rather than because of the native script.
In Japanese TV, you can even see that for influencers (idols, singers, comedians) being bad in English is considered a cute "feature", this is uniquely apply to Japan.
Japan was sealed off from the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate and only opened back up relatively recently (~150 years ago). So yeah, their culture is kinda built different to the rest of Asia, having evolved for centuries in isolation. They are still prone to exceptionalism: one story goes that European ski equipment manufacturers had difficulty exporting their skis to Japan in the 1960s because of a widespread belief that "Japanese snow is different" and Western skis would not work on it. So while the Chinese readily learn English in order to conduct trade with Westerners, there is an unconscious expectation among Japanese that potential foreign trade partners learn Japanese.
I recently moved back to the US from Japan after living there for a year. My poor Japanese made life very difficult. Easy things like calling a restaurant for a reservation or visiting the ward office was always a major challenge. I second your point that Japanese is always useful regardless of official policies. What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?
The government has been making efforts, such as trying to improve the training and certification of Japanese language teachers, making Japanese language ability a condition (or at least an advantage) for getting certain types of visas, and offering language support to immigrant children in public schools. They are also trying to promote the use of simplified Japanese—avoiding difficult vocabulary and indicating the readings of all kanji—in documents and services aimed at the general public, something that would help not only immigrants but also Japanese with lower literacy skills. I’m sure much more could be done, though.
Partly it was the location: An upper floor of a building in a neighborhood full of bars and pachinko parlors, which seemed much sleazier to me then than it would now.
But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.
In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.
Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like that are actually doing among Japanese though.
When I was hanging out in bars there, young women would approach me and beg: "Teach me Englishu!" They saw that I was white and foreign and figured I could just pour English fluency into their heads.
As for the personal questions -- yeah, I've undergone enough foreign-language instruction to understand that these are things people resort to just to have something to talk about. One question that kept coming up was "Who is your favorite singer?" Just about everyone who asked me this also provided their own answer to the question and it was always the same -- Lady Gaga. (The album Born This Way had just dropped in Japan at the time and Lady Gaga was all the rage -- bigger than One Piece, even.)
A lot of english conversation in Japan functions as de-facto paid compansionship. It's not exactly a front for escorting, but it's not completely not that either. In the west there tends to be a clear sharp line between customer service and sex work, whereas in Japan there is much more of a sliding scale from paying by the hour to hang out in a bar with friendly bar staff, to having more flirty conversations with them, through clothed touching to what's essentially a strip club experience.
15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".
You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.
There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.
The states does have breastauraunts like Hooters where you can watch the game and the bartenders and waitresses happen to be flirty and buxom, but they're compensated by tips instead of by the hour.
I almost mentioned Hooters, I think they're the exception that proves the rule - they're seen as unusual and seedy, whereas in Japan that's pretty much the norm for a bar.
"the exception that proves the rule" is such a terrible expression. I do not understand why people use it.
At some point I thought that it absurd on purpose but I had some people explaining me the rationale behind it (there is no rationale - if there is an exception it at best weakens the "rule")
The expression is referring to an implicit or unstated rule. Defining it is hard but people know when it has been broken. Hooters is an exception, the rule is, don't be like Hooters.
Just as you say, the point is that a rule is implied by a specific exception, as in the example "free entry on Sundays", which implies the unstated rule "pay for entry on other days".
The exception weakens the rule, it's true, but may also reveal the rule.
It’s a folkism, but consider this: If a rule doesn’t have any exceptions, is it really a rule? If a rule doesn’t exist how could there be any exceptions?
Yes, I was about to say the same thing. The similarities of vocabulary and grammar among those languages make it easier for speakers of one language to learn another.
Also, it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. As Europe is more multilingual than Japan, more Europeans have a head start at acquiring additional languages.
There may be other factors—stronger attachment to one’s native language and culture, resistance to seeming different from one’s peers—that make it harder for people of some nationalities to acquire foreign languages. But such claims are difficult to verify and can easily sink into superficial stereotypes, so I will be a cowardly academic and decline to take a position.
Until Japanese have an economic reason to learn English, they will continue to participate in the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes instead of actually getting good. It's a great example of the "Galapagos syndrome".
There is English education at school, but it is based entirely on rote repetition and exercises instead of y'know, understanding the language. There are "English Conversation Schools", but they are mostly scams whose goal is your continued participation, rather than having an end goal of comprehending English.
I was a teacher at an English Conversation School, more than 30 years ago, and I think that there is more to them -- or at least there was.
Where I lived, this was one of the few places to interact with a foreigner and practice English (often before going on an overseas holiday or work contract). Even better, it was a safe and controlled environment.
One of the crucial hurdles for Japanese people learning English has always been a lack of confidence and fear of looking foolish in public.
It didn't do much for English ability, because how could it when the class is only one hour a week?
Many of the schools were get-rich-quick schemes, as you say, but that doesn't mean they didn't provide a valuable function, even if they didn't contribute directly to English ability.
There is a very strong economic incentive to do well on university entrance exams - they pretty much determine the course of a Japanese person's life - and thus both schools and outside tutoring focus on teaching students to score well on the English section of those exams, to the exclusion of learning to understand or speak English.
Similarly, it can be beneficial to one's someone's career to get a high score on TOEIC, so adult classes prioritise teaching people to get high scores on TOEIC. The "education" system is extremely well aligned with the economic incentives.
I spent 4 years in Istanbul and paid for Turkish classes at a popular English school chain. Their English was bad, and all the classes were full all day.
Do you think English language conversational AI tutors could have a positive impact on a nation like Japan (which tends to be a little more introverted)?
Time will tell, maybe for the people that can create feedback loops for themselves where AI fills the gaps, but at the aggregate level I don’t think AI will move the needle. More likely people will use AI translation as a crutch, rather than learning to communicate without assistance.
I believe that reason is increasing at a higher pace in the last few years and will only keep increasing. Japan continues to bring in more foreigners both for work and as tourists, and their usual tactics of dealing with foreigners and other "problems" by cutting off the nose to spite the face (Gion, Mt Fuji Lawson, Shibuya Halloween etc.) won't work forever.
> A few days after I arrived, the landlord introduced me to an English conversation lounge in Takadanobaba. I would go there, chat with the customers in English for a few hours, and get paid 5000 yen. I quit after a couple of sessions, as the place made me uncomfortable; I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business.
I’m struck by the uniformity described. I've known people with a knack for languages, and in the US system they can opt to take more courses or go further. What do exceptional English-learning students do?
They'll look for external options whether they're paid lessons somewhere, English-related events, or online chances to talk to native speakers. Many will also go on to look for jobs in companies that involve English.
It's also worth noting that most public schools have (short) study abroad programs that will allow excellent students to apply for a few weeks in Australia or New Zealand as well.
One other interesting part of the uniformity is that perhaps because of the English focus, there's no real exposure to other foreign languages in public schools before the high school level (and sometimes not even then). Whereas in the US, I think most people have the option to study something from middle school or junior high.
I'm excluding Mandarin from this discussion, which is sometimes touched on superficially in Classical Japanese.
In my experience, exceptional English-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming English media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
I think this tracks in most adults who learn a foreign language. Within six months of moving from the US to a Western European country, I could read and understand enough spoken language to get through the day (commuting, groceries, restaurant, etc) and since then I’ve met a lot of people who have been here for a decade and still struggle with those things. The difference I believe was that I was highly motivated.
Not to toot my own horn, but I moved solely on my own accord. Sure, I have a work visa, but that was for convenience, not necessity, whereas many immigrants come for a short term job that turns into something more or because they are fleeing from war or disaster. I entered with the mindset that I need to learn the language and putting it off is just hurting my future self.
When people ask me how I learned so fast, I told them the truth. I don’t have much else to do in my free time so I “study”. These days, I even browse Reddit in my target language. I believe people are really quite capable of learning language, especially adults! But it requires intentionality and practice be develop proficiency, like anything really. If you want to get good at languages, you have to speak, read, and write every day.
To bring it back around, many of the best English speakers I have met engage parts of their life in English that they don’t need. Leisure and entertainment are the top contributors but depending on your profession, it could be required to speak/read English at work as well. It goes to your point of how the excellent students learn and I think everyone can apply to these ideas to learning across a wide range of topics.
IMX, exceptional ${LANGUAGE}-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming ${LANGUAGE} media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
Very interesting observations. My sister lives outside Tokyo and is an assistant English teacher under the JET Programme which is a government initiative to bring language teachers to schools. Her Japanese is very good - as part of being selected she was interviewed in Japanese by the local embassy so it had to be - and she reports a strong willingness in her students to learn at least some English for pragmatic reasons.
I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say.
What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.
Yet people will obsessively focus on Japan? At this point it starts to seem like NPC behavior.
You are also missing that American soft culture is even stronger than what Japan exports. It's just been around longer and normalized for so long it is just normal to consume American media outside the US. I've ran into people that know more about US laws than the laws of their home country just from watching US television
As for Japan, it's not just the western nations. Taiwan also has a huge fascination with Japan. Many Asian nations have like Japan for their strong soft culture, but detest the Japanese government for historical treatment of these nations. Japanese and American governments are heavily invested in soft power. Here is a long but interesting video discussing Japanese soft power https://youtu.be/IM2VIKfaY0Y?si=H0gRcyKtu4kMUaCj
South Korea has also had a lot of success with soft power. It's just had a later start than Japan and the US.
Yes, people are going to be interested in a culture based on its cultural exports and Japan punches way above its weight in terms of cultural exports. And it's not just anime and JAV, it's also literature and music. Having content that you want to consume will make it easier to get motivated and to stay motivated. On top of that intermediate and advanced language learning is, to a large extent, driven by media consumption so the availability of a large amount of interesting content simply makes Japanese easier to learn than many other languages.
This is also how nearly everyone learns English.
When China will start exporting interesting content more people will want to learn Chinese and succeed in learning it.
I have lived in Japan for many years. There is a certain phenomena where foreigners when they meet each other in the supermarket experience a moment of awkwardness like we entered each others TikTok feed. You don't know if one should smile or not, nod, or ignore. One of the main reasons here is that foreigners in most non-tourist parts of Japan stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore, you are quickly falling into a main-character type of mindset.
Then, for decades Japan has been the embodiment of the future. Most of William Gibsons cyberpunk work is build around Japan. That Tokyo in particular is a huge concrete Moloch that constantly bridges centuries old history and neon lights and tech underlines this. Anime/Manga have established Japan as a new cultural leader as the west has falling behind telling engaging stories. The recent Netflix success of OnePiece and the Korean Squid Games are just two data points on this. Japan is mysterious.
With all that said, it may be the last true adventure into a unique culture that is challenging yet safe and accessible.
> I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say.
If you do, it's not because of the question, but the condescending way you're framing it ("Pathological"/"NPC behavior"/etc.) If you're curious you could simply express your curiosity and people will be happy to share their thoughts.
> What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
Certainly cultural exports play a role just like they do with any country. Lots of folks are obsessed with the USA and New York City because of USA cultural exports.
Anime plays a big role in this, but it's not the only major export. Cars, video game consoles, video games, cameras, movies, music, art, food. Food! Japan's reputation across all of these things is very high, or at least has been at some point. There's a lot that's come out of Japan that has captured a lot of peoples interest and imagination as a result.
If I were to guess, Japan has a huge cultural presence in the west via comics, cartoons, and video-games. It is also "good weird." And historically it had a legendary reputation for electronics. That is a lot of western mindshare, especially amongst nerds. Chinas historic reputation is cheap crap and oppression. It has almost zero cultural presence in the west. I suspect between kpop and Korean dramas, westerners consume more Korean than Chinese media.
Why "blame"? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for people to take more interest in a country that's supplied them with interesting cultural exports than one that hasn't?
> Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel.
Only to the extent that you want to do business, diplomacy, or travel with China. More people are interested in Japan.
Japan was occupied by America and the society forcibly reconstructed and aligned with the west whereas china is culturally independent and harder to access? Just a thought.
>What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
The first thing to point out is that this goes both ways which goes a long way to explain why Japan is more accessible. As someone who is German, the amount of anime that features vaguely German settings and names (sometimes extremely grammatically broken) for no good reason has always been funny to me. Influential popular media figures like Kojima are obsessed with Western pop culture in their own right, etc.
Even the more literary or nationalistic Japanese cultural figures are often steeped in European culture, see Yukio Mishima. You can recognize Kafka in Kobo Abe's books, so as a Western reader it's both different and familiar. Chinese culture is harder to get into and in particular traditional Chinese culture is more impenetrable yet.
You’re thinking about power and money, but also should consider culture exports. I’d say it’s a combination of being a friendly nation to the west, being different, actively promoting culture internationally through media and, you know, still 3rd/4th largest economy. An extreme amount of recent travel in Japan also shows people some unique perspectives that people haven’t seen in their home countries (cleanliness, public infrastructure and etc.). I understand you can experience some of it in China as well, but there’s a massive difference between visiting Tokyo and Shanghai/Hong Kong.
Also add millions of people who grew up with anime in 1990s/2000s who are professional adults now. That helps as well.
A few random thoughts from a Japanese programmer:
(warning: not gonna be fun read)
* As far as I can tell, most Japanese programmers can read at least some portion of English software documentations
* English in Japan is always about the U.S. Not the U.K, not South Africa, not Singapore. I still remember my English teacher in the university, who was from South Africa, complained about that he was always assumed to be American.
* I find it interesting that, your article doesn't mention on the Japan's political dependence and subordination to the United States. The people who study at Tokyo Univ. are not commoners at all. They're the political and economic ruling class elites, and don't give a shit to the median Japanes people. They don't have to learn English because...why do they have to?
* English is basically for the elites. As Tatsuru Uchida pointed out, most of LDP elites have learned in American universities. [0] They're literally colonial elites.
So, that's the reason why they focus on the conversational English instead of reading/writing. Seriously, "you can teach tourists how to get to the station" as a motivation to learn the language is insane. And that's the elites want us Japanese commoners to learn in English education.
* My university English teacher (not the guy I mentioned earlier), who was a former bureaucrat who worked for the Ministry of Economy IIRC, told us that the Japan is a unique nation state, unlike the Western countries, that have kept single people and single language through the history. This is the Japanese ruling class. It was the most disgusting time I ever had in the univ, and that may be the reason I still feel very uncomfortable with English education.
* Although I'm very against the current English education, I genuinely believe learning English have improved my life. I can watch 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, I can read the books from Slavoj Zizek not translated in Japanese, and of course, I can post on HN!
* It's important that, the means to fight against colonialism is not blindly praising the native culture (see how Japanese have internalized "Japan is unique! Japan is cool!" bullshit), but to understand the relativism of the history and cultural development, and take universal values like democracy and human rights seriously - more seriously than their inventors. While American politics is becoming a kind of tragic farce, I hope Japan will present itself as a true representative of those values. It's unlikely to happen, but I hope so.
Thank you for your thoughts. They were indeed fun—and interesting—to read.
A couple of comments:
> English in Japan is always about the U.S. Not the U.K, not South Africa, not Singapore.
That is not quite as true as it used to be. The government-approved textbooks (kentei kyōkasho) for elementary and junior-high schools include characters and situations from outside the Inner Circle English-speaking countries more often than they used to, though they still have a slant toward the U.S. and toward white people:
I used to subscribe to two Japanese magazines for English educators, Eigo Kyōiku published by a commercial publisher and Shin Eigo Kyōiku published by an organization with a mission focused on democracy and justice in education. The former magazine often had articles with an American focus and photographs of white kids with blond hair, while almost every issue of the latter had a cover photograph of nonwhite children in a developing country and articles emphasizing the diversity of English.
I have been involved with the writing and editing of English textbooks, and there is often a tug-of-war between the Japanese writers and editors who want to emphasize the diversity of English and English speakers and those who prefer to stick to a focus on either the U.S. or U.K.
> I find it interesting that, your article doesn't mention on the Japan's political dependence and subordination to the United States.
That is an important topic, and I should have mentioned it as a major reason for the exclusive focus on English. Maybe I can discuss the issue in more detail in another article.
I've been assuming the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course is part of what gave Japan the heavy rural electoral weighting that's powered the LDP during nearly the entire postwar period. What do you all think?
I'm not sure. I really don't think LDP has lost. They're still the most popular party. Ishin and 国民民主(I don't know their English name) are basically the same neoconservertives as LDP. More liberal parties, CDP, communist party, or Reiwa are all unlikely to get majority support.
(BTW, you may be surprised, but Japan Communist Party has a small but solid supporters, and I'd say there's a good reason for that)
The most likely scenario for the next election is that LDP will regain the majority again, and nothing will change.
I don't think there is much to gain from intelligent Japanese people from becoming fluent in English, other than maybe leaving the country. They can already make a good living by climbing the ladder in a large firm.
It is unrealistic for the average person in the country to become fluent in English reading/writing - lots of people are barely literate in their original language. Even if everyone became more skilled and wealthier, what would that achieve? Import more junk from overseas? Increased wealth will just be funneled into land or spent on smartphone games and prostitutes.
I've lived in Japan for over a decade and I think this article summarizes some aspects of English education well. I'd like to share a few of my thoughts and experiences too.
English is often put on a very high pedestal. Speaking fluent English is associated with being "elite". A tech company in my city is slowly moving to doing all development work in English. I went to a casual tech talk event they held. Every talk was given in Japanese and most of them started with a joke along the lines of "[In English] Hello everyone, good evening! [In Japanese] Hahah, of course I'm not going to give the whole talk in English" It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
Some of my friends have kids with mixed-roots. They have grown up speaking English and Japanese. They sometimes modify their English pronunciation to sound "more Japanese" when they start English classes in school. They don't want to stand out amongst their peers.
I remember one kid, who was tri-lingual. He told a story about being called upon in English class to translate the Japanese word for "great-grandfather". He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather". They teacher and the class laughed at him. Of course, there are bad teachers everywhere but one wonders if the teacher would have tried to take him down a peg so much if he fit in a bit better. He ended up moving to Germany with his family. It makes me feel quite sad that a kid born and raised here can end up feeling more at home in a place he has no connection to.
> It makes sense to give all the talks in Japanese to a Japanese speaking audience, but the whole vibe was that English was so impossible that the idea of giving a talk in English was absurd.
When I was a student I took some classes in English, and some in my native language. Having someone speak your native language makes things infinitely easier to understand and more engaging. Even if you're a fluent speaker it's still a foreign language, so it's a mental hurdle. I can compare it to talking to a friend in a casual setting vs having a work meeting.
> He translated it correctly but his teacher said "No, it's grand-grandfather".
It's a trait of hierarchical societies. Questioning your superior is a bigger threat to the society than saying things that are objectively wrong.
While it's a fair argument that English became the lingua franca and if you don't speak it, you will be left behind, I feel like most Americans are completely oblivious to the idea that other cultures might exist. I work for an American company in Europe, and most of Americans don't do any effort to learn the local language, and those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
> those who do, simply use local words to express their American thoughts.
I feel like there's almost the reverse stereotype of this for Americans living in Japan. Like, that they're weirdly obsessed with Japanese culture and try too hard to become more Japanese.
I only speak English, but I have found and theorized that one's ability to learn and retain a L2 is heavily affected by your society's "need" to communicate outside of the national language. This article largely reinforces that theory.
If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle. People in Finland report higher levels of English competency than people in France (despite French being much closer to English than Finnish is) because there are so many fewer Finnish speakers. Finns wanting to experience warm beaches or global cities need to communicate when traveling to those places outside of Finland. France meanwhile has mountains, beaches, a big domestic market, ample media, and international reach.
Japan is much more like France than Finland - the geographic diversity allows one to ski or sunbathe within the same country. The domestic market for goods and services is huge. Japan creates and exports so much culture that English speakers wish to learn Japanese to consume more of it. When there is little "need" to learn another language, it is not only less enticing but actually harder to do so.
This culminates in anglophones being at a disadvantage in acquiring a L2 compared to nearly anyone else. A lot of people worldwide do want to practice their English with a native speaker. Many international institutions use English as the lingua franca. Even during a layover in Montreal, my (then) girlfriend ordered a smoothie in French and was replied to in English (this could be a commentary on Canadian bilingualism, but I'll leave that for another day) - it's hard for an anglophone to practice and perfect another language when the world around them already speaks better English than their L2.
So considering Japan's strong domestic market, culture, and the stark differences between the languages, it was never a shock to me that their English proficiency isn't where one would immediately expect it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and the deep experience behind them.
That's probably most of it, but the way Japan typically teaches English is sort of notoriously bad. That probably doesn't help either.
> If people do not have a need to learn another language, it becomes an uphill battle.
You do see some Japanese companies talking up the need for English competency; I suppose if more and more companies there use English competency as one thing they're looking for in job applicants, that might cause a shift elsewhere, as suddenly there's a 'need' (and thus a motivation).
That is my experience with Brazil as well, it is very uncommon to find people who speak good english there in part because nobody ever travels outside the country.
I am the author of this article and will be interested to read HNers’ thoughts and discussion about the topic.
I will also be happy to respond to questions.
Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.
Thank you for the kind words! I am glad to hear that you found that book useful.
The editor and I did discuss a sequel and I started collecting material for it, but I had changed careers by that point and no longer had the time or motivation to see it through to completion. And now I’m not sure if there’s a market for such books anymore. At least, if I were learning to read Japanese myself now, rather than buying a book of annotated readings I would choose my own texts and ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about the parts I don’t understand.
Bilingual in Japan, also studying Mandarin.
Proficient English is just a “plus-alpha”, as they say.
You don’t need it, but it might open up a few more doors.
Then there’s certain topics, like science/medicine where English to some extent is absolutely necessary to keep up with research. Even then, I find some of these people still struggle with speaking and listening, but reading and writing can be pretty solid.
> The notion of “fairness” dominates English education policy in Japan. Because of the importance of educational credentials in Japanese life, any policy that seems to favor one group or another—the rich, the urban, children with highly-educated parents, or children who happen to have acquired English fluency on their own—will attract popular opposition.
I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.
I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.
Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.
I think it's more apt to compare between Korea / China / Japan where the written language is not Latin-based.
From my experience, most Vietnamese students catch up quickly with extra-curricular English class during their 4 years university.
Not really, there's little to almost no difference in English literacy between Viet, Korea & China. Yet there's a big gap compare to Japan, the reason is either culture and economic incentive rather than because of the native script.
In Japanese TV, you can even see that for influencers (idols, singers, comedians) being bad in English is considered a cute "feature", this is uniquely apply to Japan.
Japan was sealed off from the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate and only opened back up relatively recently (~150 years ago). So yeah, their culture is kinda built different to the rest of Asia, having evolved for centuries in isolation. They are still prone to exceptionalism: one story goes that European ski equipment manufacturers had difficulty exporting their skis to Japan in the 1960s because of a widespread belief that "Japanese snow is different" and Western skis would not work on it. So while the Chinese readily learn English in order to conduct trade with Westerners, there is an unconscious expectation among Japanese that potential foreign trade partners learn Japanese.
yeah, the novelty approach to English is one of the things that is inherently holding back Japan from any generally decent level of English.
Lovely article.
I recently moved back to the US from Japan after living there for a year. My poor Japanese made life very difficult. Easy things like calling a restaurant for a reservation or visiting the ward office was always a major challenge. I second your point that Japanese is always useful regardless of official policies. What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants?
Thanks!
The government has been making efforts, such as trying to improve the training and certification of Japanese language teachers, making Japanese language ability a condition (or at least an advantage) for getting certain types of visas, and offering language support to immigrant children in public schools. They are also trying to promote the use of simplified Japanese—avoiding difficult vocabulary and indicating the readings of all kanji—in documents and services aimed at the general public, something that would help not only immigrants but also Japanese with lower literacy skills. I’m sure much more could be done, though.
> I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business.
Just curious what your suspicions were at the English conversation lounge and why it made you uncomfortable?
Partly it was the location: An upper floor of a building in a neighborhood full of bars and pachinko parlors, which seemed much sleazier to me then than it would now.
But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.
In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.
Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like that are actually doing among Japanese though.
When I was hanging out in bars there, young women would approach me and beg: "Teach me Englishu!" They saw that I was white and foreign and figured I could just pour English fluency into their heads.
As for the personal questions -- yeah, I've undergone enough foreign-language instruction to understand that these are things people resort to just to have something to talk about. One question that kept coming up was "Who is your favorite singer?" Just about everyone who asked me this also provided their own answer to the question and it was always the same -- Lady Gaga. (The album Born This Way had just dropped in Japan at the time and Lady Gaga was all the rage -- bigger than One Piece, even.)
A lot of english conversation in Japan functions as de-facto paid compansionship. It's not exactly a front for escorting, but it's not completely not that either. In the west there tends to be a clear sharp line between customer service and sex work, whereas in Japan there is much more of a sliding scale from paying by the hour to hang out in a bar with friendly bar staff, to having more flirty conversations with them, through clothed touching to what's essentially a strip club experience.
15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".
You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.
There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.
The states does have breastauraunts like Hooters where you can watch the game and the bartenders and waitresses happen to be flirty and buxom, but they're compensated by tips instead of by the hour.
I almost mentioned Hooters, I think they're the exception that proves the rule - they're seen as unusual and seedy, whereas in Japan that's pretty much the norm for a bar.
"the exception that proves the rule" is such a terrible expression. I do not understand why people use it.
At some point I thought that it absurd on purpose but I had some people explaining me the rationale behind it (there is no rationale - if there is an exception it at best weakens the "rule")
The expression is referring to an implicit or unstated rule. Defining it is hard but people know when it has been broken. Hooters is an exception, the rule is, don't be like Hooters.
I see from Wiktionary that it was originally a legal concept, expressed in medieval Latin.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exception_that_proves_the_rul...
Just as you say, the point is that a rule is implied by a specific exception, as in the example "free entry on Sundays", which implies the unstated rule "pay for entry on other days".
The exception weakens the rule, it's true, but may also reveal the rule.
Thank you! I never understood the expression, but this explanation was immediately clarifying for me.
It’s a folkism, but consider this: If a rule doesn’t have any exceptions, is it really a rule? If a rule doesn’t exist how could there be any exceptions?
How do you think it compares to various European countries?
Say, Germany, Spain, Italy (or any that you're familiar with).
Northern Europeans seem to be fantastic at learning languages. It's surprising the rest of the world doesn't copy what they do.
To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.
Yes, I was about to say the same thing. The similarities of vocabulary and grammar among those languages make it easier for speakers of one language to learn another.
Also, it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. As Europe is more multilingual than Japan, more Europeans have a head start at acquiring additional languages.
There may be other factors—stronger attachment to one’s native language and culture, resistance to seeming different from one’s peers—that make it harder for people of some nationalities to acquire foreign languages. But such claims are difficult to verify and can easily sink into superficial stereotypes, so I will be a cowardly academic and decline to take a position.
Until Japanese have an economic reason to learn English, they will continue to participate in the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes instead of actually getting good. It's a great example of the "Galapagos syndrome".
There is English education at school, but it is based entirely on rote repetition and exercises instead of y'know, understanding the language. There are "English Conversation Schools", but they are mostly scams whose goal is your continued participation, rather than having an end goal of comprehending English.
I was a teacher at an English Conversation School, more than 30 years ago, and I think that there is more to them -- or at least there was.
Where I lived, this was one of the few places to interact with a foreigner and practice English (often before going on an overseas holiday or work contract). Even better, it was a safe and controlled environment.
One of the crucial hurdles for Japanese people learning English has always been a lack of confidence and fear of looking foolish in public.
It didn't do much for English ability, because how could it when the class is only one hour a week?
Many of the schools were get-rich-quick schemes, as you say, but that doesn't mean they didn't provide a valuable function, even if they didn't contribute directly to English ability.
There is a very strong economic incentive to do well on university entrance exams - they pretty much determine the course of a Japanese person's life - and thus both schools and outside tutoring focus on teaching students to score well on the English section of those exams, to the exclusion of learning to understand or speak English.
Similarly, it can be beneficial to one's someone's career to get a high score on TOEIC, so adult classes prioritise teaching people to get high scores on TOEIC. The "education" system is extremely well aligned with the economic incentives.
That is exactly what I meant by Galapagos syndrome. I should have written external(= business conducted in English) economic incentive.
The elephant in the room is that 6/12 years school here are focused on rote remembering for the next entrance exam rather than learning.
Meh. Poor priority in schooling and teaching to the test are hardly unique to Japan.
"Other countries have problems too"
OK, let's just give up trying to improve then.
"Japan has the exact same problem as many other countries. This is a perfect example of Galapagos syndrome"
I spent 4 years in Istanbul and paid for Turkish classes at a popular English school chain. Their English was bad, and all the classes were full all day.
Do you think English language conversational AI tutors could have a positive impact on a nation like Japan (which tends to be a little more introverted)?
Time will tell, maybe for the people that can create feedback loops for themselves where AI fills the gaps, but at the aggregate level I don’t think AI will move the needle. More likely people will use AI translation as a crutch, rather than learning to communicate without assistance.
I believe that reason is increasing at a higher pace in the last few years and will only keep increasing. Japan continues to bring in more foreigners both for work and as tourists, and their usual tactics of dealing with foreigners and other "problems" by cutting off the nose to spite the face (Gion, Mt Fuji Lawson, Shibuya Halloween etc.) won't work forever.
> A few days after I arrived, the landlord introduced me to an English conversation lounge in Takadanobaba. I would go there, chat with the customers in English for a few hours, and get paid 5000 yen. I quit after a couple of sessions, as the place made me uncomfortable; I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business.
I wonder what kind of front it could be?
It probably wasn’t a front after all; I just didn’t understand the situation. I wrote more in another thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073152
I’m struck by the uniformity described. I've known people with a knack for languages, and in the US system they can opt to take more courses or go further. What do exceptional English-learning students do?
They'll look for external options whether they're paid lessons somewhere, English-related events, or online chances to talk to native speakers. Many will also go on to look for jobs in companies that involve English.
It's also worth noting that most public schools have (short) study abroad programs that will allow excellent students to apply for a few weeks in Australia or New Zealand as well.
One other interesting part of the uniformity is that perhaps because of the English focus, there's no real exposure to other foreign languages in public schools before the high school level (and sometimes not even then). Whereas in the US, I think most people have the option to study something from middle school or junior high.
I'm excluding Mandarin from this discussion, which is sometimes touched on superficially in Classical Japanese.
In my experience, exceptional English-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming English media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
I think this tracks in most adults who learn a foreign language. Within six months of moving from the US to a Western European country, I could read and understand enough spoken language to get through the day (commuting, groceries, restaurant, etc) and since then I’ve met a lot of people who have been here for a decade and still struggle with those things. The difference I believe was that I was highly motivated.
Not to toot my own horn, but I moved solely on my own accord. Sure, I have a work visa, but that was for convenience, not necessity, whereas many immigrants come for a short term job that turns into something more or because they are fleeing from war or disaster. I entered with the mindset that I need to learn the language and putting it off is just hurting my future self.
When people ask me how I learned so fast, I told them the truth. I don’t have much else to do in my free time so I “study”. These days, I even browse Reddit in my target language. I believe people are really quite capable of learning language, especially adults! But it requires intentionality and practice be develop proficiency, like anything really. If you want to get good at languages, you have to speak, read, and write every day.
To bring it back around, many of the best English speakers I have met engage parts of their life in English that they don’t need. Leisure and entertainment are the top contributors but depending on your profession, it could be required to speak/read English at work as well. It goes to your point of how the excellent students learn and I think everyone can apply to these ideas to learning across a wide range of topics.
IMX, exceptional ${LANGUAGE}-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming ${LANGUAGE} media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
Very interesting observations. My sister lives outside Tokyo and is an assistant English teacher under the JET Programme which is a government initiative to bring language teachers to schools. Her Japanese is very good - as part of being selected she was interviewed in Japanese by the local embassy so it had to be - and she reports a strong willingness in her students to learn at least some English for pragmatic reasons.
I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say.
What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Look, you have Chinese spoken by 1.35 billion people. Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel. China is the new emerging superpower.
Yet people will obsessively focus on Japan? At this point it starts to seem like NPC behavior.
You are also missing that American soft culture is even stronger than what Japan exports. It's just been around longer and normalized for so long it is just normal to consume American media outside the US. I've ran into people that know more about US laws than the laws of their home country just from watching US television
As for Japan, it's not just the western nations. Taiwan also has a huge fascination with Japan. Many Asian nations have like Japan for their strong soft culture, but detest the Japanese government for historical treatment of these nations. Japanese and American governments are heavily invested in soft power. Here is a long but interesting video discussing Japanese soft power https://youtu.be/IM2VIKfaY0Y?si=H0gRcyKtu4kMUaCj
South Korea has also had a lot of success with soft power. It's just had a later start than Japan and the US.
> Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Yes, people are going to be interested in a culture based on its cultural exports and Japan punches way above its weight in terms of cultural exports. And it's not just anime and JAV, it's also literature and music. Having content that you want to consume will make it easier to get motivated and to stay motivated. On top of that intermediate and advanced language learning is, to a large extent, driven by media consumption so the availability of a large amount of interesting content simply makes Japanese easier to learn than many other languages.
This is also how nearly everyone learns English.
When China will start exporting interesting content more people will want to learn Chinese and succeed in learning it.
I have lived in Japan for many years. There is a certain phenomena where foreigners when they meet each other in the supermarket experience a moment of awkwardness like we entered each others TikTok feed. You don't know if one should smile or not, nod, or ignore. One of the main reasons here is that foreigners in most non-tourist parts of Japan stick out like a sore thumb. Therefore, you are quickly falling into a main-character type of mindset. Then, for decades Japan has been the embodiment of the future. Most of William Gibsons cyberpunk work is build around Japan. That Tokyo in particular is a huge concrete Moloch that constantly bridges centuries old history and neon lights and tech underlines this. Anime/Manga have established Japan as a new cultural leader as the west has falling behind telling engaging stories. The recent Netflix success of OnePiece and the Korean Squid Games are just two data points on this. Japan is mysterious.
With all that said, it may be the last true adventure into a unique culture that is challenging yet safe and accessible.
> I will get downvoted and hated for what I'm going to say.
If you do, it's not because of the question, but the condescending way you're framing it ("Pathological"/"NPC behavior"/etc.) If you're curious you could simply express your curiosity and people will be happy to share their thoughts.
> What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
Certainly cultural exports play a role just like they do with any country. Lots of folks are obsessed with the USA and New York City because of USA cultural exports.
Anime plays a big role in this, but it's not the only major export. Cars, video game consoles, video games, cameras, movies, music, art, food. Food! Japan's reputation across all of these things is very high, or at least has been at some point. There's a lot that's come out of Japan that has captured a lot of peoples interest and imagination as a result.
If I were to guess, Japan has a huge cultural presence in the west via comics, cartoons, and video-games. It is also "good weird." And historically it had a legendary reputation for electronics. That is a lot of western mindshare, especially amongst nerds. Chinas historic reputation is cheap crap and oppression. It has almost zero cultural presence in the west. I suspect between kpop and Korean dramas, westerners consume more Korean than Chinese media.
> Is anime & JAV to blame here?
Why "blame"? Isn't it perfectly reasonable for people to take more interest in a country that's supplied them with interesting cultural exports than one that hasn't?
> Foreigners who speak Chinese are way more rare than those who speak Japanese, therefore making it a more valuable language to acquire for business, diplomacy and travel.
Only to the extent that you want to do business, diplomacy, or travel with China. More people are interested in Japan.
Japan was occupied by America and the society forcibly reconstructed and aligned with the west whereas china is culturally independent and harder to access? Just a thought.
Japan is also very small which makes it easy to "understand"
Japan is actually quite large - its land area is about the same as Germany, and it's the 11th most populous country in the world.
>What's with the west's pathalogical obsession with Japan and Japanese?
The first thing to point out is that this goes both ways which goes a long way to explain why Japan is more accessible. As someone who is German, the amount of anime that features vaguely German settings and names (sometimes extremely grammatically broken) for no good reason has always been funny to me. Influential popular media figures like Kojima are obsessed with Western pop culture in their own right, etc.
Even the more literary or nationalistic Japanese cultural figures are often steeped in European culture, see Yukio Mishima. You can recognize Kafka in Kobo Abe's books, so as a Western reader it's both different and familiar. Chinese culture is harder to get into and in particular traditional Chinese culture is more impenetrable yet.
You’re thinking about power and money, but also should consider culture exports. I’d say it’s a combination of being a friendly nation to the west, being different, actively promoting culture internationally through media and, you know, still 3rd/4th largest economy. An extreme amount of recent travel in Japan also shows people some unique perspectives that people haven’t seen in their home countries (cleanliness, public infrastructure and etc.). I understand you can experience some of it in China as well, but there’s a massive difference between visiting Tokyo and Shanghai/Hong Kong.
Also add millions of people who grew up with anime in 1990s/2000s who are professional adults now. That helps as well.
People don't find authoritarian communism aspirational.
same will be said about conservative authoritarians in the US for next 20 years lol
>China is the new emerging superpower.
Japan is the regional cultural superpower - that doesn't require they have the largest economy or military.
The finance industry in Japan is such a wasteland.
A few random thoughts from a Japanese programmer: (warning: not gonna be fun read)
* As far as I can tell, most Japanese programmers can read at least some portion of English software documentations
* English in Japan is always about the U.S. Not the U.K, not South Africa, not Singapore. I still remember my English teacher in the university, who was from South Africa, complained about that he was always assumed to be American.
* I find it interesting that, your article doesn't mention on the Japan's political dependence and subordination to the United States. The people who study at Tokyo Univ. are not commoners at all. They're the political and economic ruling class elites, and don't give a shit to the median Japanes people. They don't have to learn English because...why do they have to?
* English is basically for the elites. As Tatsuru Uchida pointed out, most of LDP elites have learned in American universities. [0] They're literally colonial elites.
> 逆に、植民地的言語教育では、原住民の子どもたちにはテクストを読む力はできるだけ付けさせないようにする。うっかり読む力が身に着くと、植民地の賢い子どもたちは、宗主国の植民地官僚が読まないような古典を読み、彼らが理解できないような知識や教養を身に付ける「リスク」があるからです。植民地の子どもが無教養な宗主国の大人に向かってすらすらとシェークスピアを引用したりして、宗主国民の知的優越性を脅かすということは何があっても避けなければならない。だから、読む力はつねに話す力よりも劣位に置かれる。「難しい英語の本なんか読めても仕方がない。それより日常会話だ」というようなことを平然と言い放つ人がいますけれど、これは骨の髄まで「植民地人根性」がしみこんだ人間の言い草です。[1]
So, that's the reason why they focus on the conversational English instead of reading/writing. Seriously, "you can teach tourists how to get to the station" as a motivation to learn the language is insane. And that's the elites want us Japanese commoners to learn in English education.
* My university English teacher (not the guy I mentioned earlier), who was a former bureaucrat who worked for the Ministry of Economy IIRC, told us that the Japan is a unique nation state, unlike the Western countries, that have kept single people and single language through the history. This is the Japanese ruling class. It was the most disgusting time I ever had in the univ, and that may be the reason I still feel very uncomfortable with English education.
* Although I'm very against the current English education, I genuinely believe learning English have improved my life. I can watch 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, I can read the books from Slavoj Zizek not translated in Japanese, and of course, I can post on HN!
* It's important that, the means to fight against colonialism is not blindly praising the native culture (see how Japanese have internalized "Japan is unique! Japan is cool!" bullshit), but to understand the relativism of the history and cultural development, and take universal values like democracy and human rights seriously - more seriously than their inventors. While American politics is becoming a kind of tragic farce, I hope Japan will present itself as a true representative of those values. It's unlikely to happen, but I hope so.
[0]: http://blog.tatsuru.com/2024/10/11_1037.html [1]: http://blog.tatsuru.com/2018/10/31_1510.html
Heh, Slavoj Zizek. Why should the Japanese learn English? To understand a Slovenian, naturally!
Thank you for your thoughts. They were indeed fun—and interesting—to read.
A couple of comments:
> English in Japan is always about the U.S. Not the U.K, not South Africa, not Singapore.
That is not quite as true as it used to be. The government-approved textbooks (kentei kyōkasho) for elementary and junior-high schools include characters and situations from outside the Inner Circle English-speaking countries more often than they used to, though they still have a slant toward the U.S. and toward white people:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jacetkanto/11/0/11_46/_...
I used to subscribe to two Japanese magazines for English educators, Eigo Kyōiku published by a commercial publisher and Shin Eigo Kyōiku published by an organization with a mission focused on democracy and justice in education. The former magazine often had articles with an American focus and photographs of white kids with blond hair, while almost every issue of the latter had a cover photograph of nonwhite children in a developing country and articles emphasizing the diversity of English.
I have been involved with the writing and editing of English textbooks, and there is often a tug-of-war between the Japanese writers and editors who want to emphasize the diversity of English and English speakers and those who prefer to stick to a focus on either the U.S. or U.K.
> I find it interesting that, your article doesn't mention on the Japan's political dependence and subordination to the United States.
That is an important topic, and I should have mentioned it as a major reason for the exclusive focus on English. Maybe I can discuss the issue in more detail in another article.
Thanks for your reply.
> That is not quite as true as it used to be.
Interesting, let's see how it will change or not.
> Maybe I can discuss the issue in more detail in another article.
I definitely look forward to it.
フィンランド人のプログラマーです。日本で２年ぐらい住みまして、英語のことや、日本のエリートのことは「植民地」って言われるのが初耳ですが…そう言われみれば、その通ですね。日本も確かに、言われた通、ユニークと特別なものではないです。もちろん、特別なところあるが、各国がそれぞれで様々な魅力や個性があります。
大変興味深いな書き込みでした。ありがとうございました。
What do you feel about the LDP loosing? Step in the right direction?
I've been assuming the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course is part of what gave Japan the heavy rural electoral weighting that's powered the LDP during nearly the entire postwar period. What do you all think?
I'm not sure. I really don't think LDP has lost. They're still the most popular party. Ishin and 国民民主(I don't know their English name) are basically the same neoconservertives as LDP. More liberal parties, CDP, communist party, or Reiwa are all unlikely to get majority support.
(BTW, you may be surprised, but Japan Communist Party has a small but solid supporters, and I'd say there's a good reason for that)
The most likely scenario for the next election is that LDP will regain the majority again, and nothing will change.
I don't think there is much to gain from intelligent Japanese people from becoming fluent in English, other than maybe leaving the country. They can already make a good living by climbing the ladder in a large firm.
It is unrealistic for the average person in the country to become fluent in English reading/writing - lots of people are barely literate in their original language. Even if everyone became more skilled and wealthier, what would that achieve? Import more junk from overseas? Increased wealth will just be funneled into land or spent on smartphone games and prostitutes.