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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
[dead]