21 ms·

The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan

204 points by pwim 2y ago

majikaja 2y ago
The finance industry in Japan is such a wasteland.
tkgally 2y ago
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.
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
  > 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?
  - tkgally 2y ago
    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.
    - bitwize 2y ago
      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.)
      - svilen_dobrev 2y ago
        > so they will try damn near anything 2012.. i am not a native english-speaker but white, in Tokyo for 2 weeks, staying in friend's apartment, not knowing a word except "Arigato". One day, In some very big shop, i was looking for some locally made hand cream, and after walking the shelves with hundreds of things only labelled in japanese hieroglyphs, i asked the lady on the cash-desk "Where are hand-creams?" and she showed me to one shelf full of Avon stuff (which i saw but avoided), and eventually at its end there were some others japanese. So i looked at there and picked one or two, choosing by colorfulness of the bottle :) All that time, a student-age-girl was staying at next row, keeping and looking at some pocket device in her hands, and when i finally picked something, she approached me and asked, in not-that-bad-english : "Excuse me, did you ask for a "hand cream"? You know, this picking of any opportunity to train your hearing/speaking is.. amazingly diligent. And their curiosity also amazed me. Ever since i'd like to try move and live there, but.. too bad it's very difficult to go to work or live there. Expensiveness is only one little part of it..
        2y ago
  - lmm 2y ago
    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.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
      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.
      - lmm 2y ago
        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.
        BrandoElFollito 2y ago
        "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")
        sosborn 2y ago
        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?
        junkjunkjunkjun 2y ago
        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.
- sour-taste 2y ago
  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?
  - tkgally 2y ago
    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.
  - Phrodo_00 2y ago
    > What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants? It really boggles my mind how many immigrants to a place (because it doesn't just happen in Japan) are fine not trying to learn the language, especially if the place doesn't even understand the languages you know. You'd think living in such a place would be enough encouragement (it certainly would be for me), but I keep seeing stories about immigrants in several places not bothering to learn a common language of where they live.
- wdutch 2y ago
  > 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.
  - sodfj11240 2y ago
    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.
    - unrealhoang 2y ago
      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.
      - mc3301 2y ago
        yeah, the novelty approach to English is one of the things that is inherently holding back Japan from any generally decent level of English.
- einichi 2y ago
  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.
- sien 2y ago
  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.
  - minebreaker 2y ago
    To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.
    - tkgally 2y ago
      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.
      - eszed 2y ago
        > it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. Yes, that's empirically verified by multiple studies. My pet theory about that is that a great deal of one's psychological sense of self is tied to one's ability to communicate with others. Learning a new language entails "letting go", to a great extent, of a linguistic sense of self. (Peter Hessler writes perceptively and humourously about this in one of his early books.) People who speak more than one language have either a) gone through this process (as adults) already, and can negotiate it more easily, or b) have (as dual-native speakers) a self-perception that is less-rigidly tied to a particular language context. This is also why people who are highly articulate in their native tongue often progress more slowly than people who are not. I have more than once been humbled by someone who (natively) speaks what I'd (in my academic arrogance) judge to be "bad English" zooming ahead of me in foreign language acquisition. I'm concerned about being "correct", while they burble away unconcernedly and leave me far behind. Those experiences have been good for my character. :-) See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992, down-thread a bit, who makes this point better than I did.
- SiVal 2y ago
  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.
  - tkgally 2y ago
    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.
    - SiVal 2y ago
      It's a little sad, but you're right of course that many books no longer make business sense now that everything they offer is online and free. Well, when the AIs put us all out of business and we're home all day in our rabbit hutches, we'll have plenty of time and free content to read.
- CarVac 2y ago
  I just visited Japan and found the language situation around tourists was frankly perplexing. With some tourists, English was a lingua franca. I ran across some Chinese tourists asking some non-English speaking white tourists (French maybe?) a question in English and not being able to communicate. With others, Japanese was the interchange language of choice, such as with some Taiwanese tourists. For native Japanese people speaking English, it was invariably a huge relief for them to fall back to speaking in Japanese with me. Even those with excellent English pronunciation were like this too. Only once did I feel weird speaking Japanese, with a hotel receptionist who turned out to be Korean.
- KTallguy 2y ago
  Thank you for the article! I’m an American who’s lived on and off in Japan for around 10 years, currently in Tokyo working in game development. I related to many parts of your article, especially the later part about foreign devs working with Japanese executives. My work environment aims to be multilingual (Japanese/English) but creative conversations are inevitably stymied by pauses for translation. Machine translation and AI is helpful but fails to capture nuance, and compounds normal, everyday communication woes. Japanese only speakers on our team feel lonely and left out despite best efforts. Japanese applicants are quite rare because of the stress of being in such an environment. It’s exhausting when people around you don’t share common cultural touchstones and every conversation is an unpredictable exchange. On the other side, although many of my non-Japanese colleagues speak varying levels of Japanese, some have tried but are unable to (or don’t care to) improve further. Working proficiency is a high bar, and our “real work” is busy. You can get by in Tokyo with cursory Japanese, translation apps and online reservations. There is a large expat community, so you can ignore the “Japan for Japanese people” if you so choose. I wonder how things will change as the native population continues to shrink over the years. Even in Tokyo, many businesses have responded to the tourist explosion by insulating themselves in various ways. There are recent incidents related to concentrated immigrant populations as well. I hope that we avoid the xenophobic trend that is sweeping the rest of the world but I do worry.
  - tkgally 2y ago
    Thanks for the comments! I have been following developments in MT and AI as close as I can and have been interested in how well MT works—or doesn’t—in real-life situations, but I don’t get much opportunity to experience such situations myself. Your description of your work environment is really valuable to me. Your report about some of your non-Japanese colleagues not making much progress with Japanese matches my own experience in academia. A few years after I started working at the university, we began hiring a steady stream of youngish academics from around the world to teach academic writing classes in English to undergraduates. Some of them already had good Japanese ability, and the others all started out wanting to learn. But being busy with teaching and research and being able to get by in Tokyo with just English meant that few of the latter group made much progress beyond basic conversation. The language is hard, adult life is busy, and acquiring languages gets steadily harder for most of us as we get older. I also wonder about how Japan will change and adapt as the native population continues to decrease. At the government and business levels, the overall response to the growing foreign population seems to be a slow shift toward adaptation. Among the general population, it’s hard for me to tell.
skhr0680 2y ago
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.
- lmm 2y ago
  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.
  - skhr0680 2y ago
    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.
    - lmm 2y ago
      Meh. Poor priority in schooling and teaching to the test are hardly unique to Japan.
      - skhr0680 2y ago
        "Other countries have problems too" OK, let's just give up trying to improve then.
shermantanktop 2y ago
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?
- rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
  In my experience, exceptional English-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming English media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    IMX, exceptional ${LANGUAGE}-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming ${LANGUAGE} media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    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.
avsudhficc 2y ago
In my opinion, in general: - You must learn the language of the country hosting you (if you live there for any extended period). - Learning a language is really hard, so I don’t expect everyone to reach fluency. But you must put significant, persistent effort into it. - Countries should protect their languages, and should resist the urge to Anglicize everything.
minebreaker 2y ago
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 http://blog.tatsuru.com/2024/10/11_1037.html [1]: http://blog.tatsuru.com/2018/10/31_1510.html http://blog.tatsuru.com/2018/10/31_1510.html
bulbosaur123 2y ago
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.
- okeuro49 2y ago
  People don't find authoritarian communism aspirational.
  - tigrezno 2y ago
    same will be said about conservative authoritarians in the US for next 20 years lol
- jsemrau 2y ago
  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.
- twiceaday 2y ago
  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.
majikaja 2y ago
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.
- dangsux 2y ago
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dangsux 2y ago
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laurieg 2y ago
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.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  > 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.
SpecialistK 2y ago
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.
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  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).
m463 2y ago
> 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?
- tkgally 2y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073152
baruchthescribe 2y ago
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.
ekusiadadus 2y ago
I'm Japanese. Speaking English in Japan is very challenging. All my friends and family speak Japanese, and everything from social media to news is completely accessible in Japanese. I'm an entrepreneur, and I use English when talking with international clients and overseas VCs. However, I lack confidence, and the communication tends to remain superficial, making it difficult to effectively do business internationally. In this environment, it's hard to feel a real necessity to communicate in English. Since elementary school, we've been told that being able to speak English is extremely important, and I studied hard. Yet in this environment, there are rarely opportunities to actually use English. When foreigners tell us about the importance of English, they may not fully understand that it doesn't really matter much to most Japanese people. Japanese people might start speaking English when they truly need it. Rather than that, I'd be happier if AI could provide real-time translation for everything.
- tomcam 2y ago
  Your written English is excellent. You are underestimating your skills, I think. Is there a world in which you could simply pause and plan out your words before speaking? Westerners won’t mind. Elon Musk often pauses noticeably in interviews when he’s discussing something controversial or novel, for example. I retrained myself how to speak in my 20s and went through a similar process.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    In general just pausing without saying eeuuh will make you smarter.
  - Smar 2y ago
    Spoken English is completely different language from written English. Even more so with native speakers.
- germandiago 2y ago
  I have been a couple of times in Japan, have some Japanese friends here in Vietnam, where I live. I am spanish. In my humble opinion, japanese society is very kind and well-behaved, but, if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out. And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I mean, there is much less difference between foreigners entering Spain, in general terms, and foreigners entering in Japan. I love Japan, but I am not sure it would be a particularly comfortable place to live since Japanese have a very traditional culture and habits, so being part of the group is not an easy task. In fact, I think you will never be a part of the group as I would understand it in spanish terms, when, for example, an argentinian or a romanian becomes in Spain over time. The japanese culture is one one of the cultures I admire the most in many aspects: disciplined, orderly... but one thing is that and a very different thing is living there and becoming fully integrated. I think that's tough.
throw78311 2y ago
I posit that Japan is able to keep its "exoticness" (to much of the world) as a culture because the cultural osmosis that comes from having a populace with good English skills promotes homogenization. I imagine a Japan that's highly fluent in English will look a lot more similar to S. Korea. I might go to extend this theory and say the quality of English literacy in Japan is intentionally kneecapped at some level in an attempt to retain their cultural identity, even if unconsciously.
CarVac 2y ago
I just went on vacation to Japan and it was fascinating how much relief even the competent English-speakers there seemed to show when I would speak with them in my semi-fluent (vocab-deficient though) Japanese. There are translations everywhere, on signs and in museums (those are fascinating because the translations omit 80% of the detail since foreigners will lack historical contextual knowledge) but I got the feeling that with the exception of accommodating tourists, there's never any use for most natives to ever speak English.
ggm 2y ago
"Year of living Danishly" [0] is this but for English -> Denmark. Neighbours who knock on your door to explain you are putting the rubbish bin out wrongly in the street and it concerns them. My sense of Denmark changed after reading this book, to one which included 'very high expectations of social conformity' which in some ways, matches Japan. (ok. not this exactly because not primarily language focussed but there is topic drift in this thread) [0] The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country - Helen Russell
reactivematter 2y ago
Language is a technology to communicate thoughts. Over time it has become an important cultural aspect, but it should be treated firstly as a technology. Over time as technologies evolve and people adapt to it, with globalization there is no escape from the requirement of a common language (_lingua franca_). Though English serves a default common language due to the colonization era, I don't see any serious attempts by big nations (I mean population wise) to develop a common language that all can claim their own. Without this, in another 100 years, despite united by globalization and web technologies, knowledge barriers will continue to remain due to different languages.
majikaja 2y ago
What is there to integrate into? Adult life is mostly just going to work to pay the bills. I don't know anyone with a particularly interesting life outside of their job. Most Japanese people aren't going to be any less apathetic about a foreigner than others of their own group. Naturally there will be more traction with those looking for free English teachers and gaijin hunters. What a larger proportion of people likes is money and entertainment. Not so much foreigners trying to be Japanese. A foreigner giving such vibes will always be lower down in social status than the natives.
- majikaja 2y ago
  If you want to be respected (but not 'integrate') as a foreigner by traditional society in Japan it's good to work at a prestigious place where there are few Japanese people such as an embassy. Failing that a gaishikei company that sounds foreign to people who don't know better but isn't (likely >90% Japanese). Or just be rich (this may also involve being very picky or completely averse to working with the native population).
  - majikaja 2y ago
    I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed if they go to Japan expecting the same social structures they enjoyed in the west to exist in the same form, just hidden somewhere behind the language barrier. Don't even expect the drinks after work culture, a lot of that has disappeared. It was a thing when people actually had hopes that showing loyalty to a company would improve their lives. If you want to enjoy life just watch videos of expats chilling in places Thailand for inspiration. Otherwise you may become like the Japanese people and end up bored and wanting to leave.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]

204 points by pwim 2y ago

The finance industry in Japan is such a wasteland.

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.

rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
> 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?
- tkgally 2y ago
  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.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    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.)
    - svilen_dobrev 2y ago
      > so they will try damn near anything 2012.. i am not a native english-speaker but white, in Tokyo for 2 weeks, staying in friend's apartment, not knowing a word except "Arigato". One day, In some very big shop, i was looking for some locally made hand cream, and after walking the shelves with hundreds of things only labelled in japanese hieroglyphs, i asked the lady on the cash-desk "Where are hand-creams?" and she showed me to one shelf full of Avon stuff (which i saw but avoided), and eventually at its end there were some others japanese. So i looked at there and picked one or two, choosing by colorfulness of the bottle :) All that time, a student-age-girl was staying at next row, keeping and looking at some pocket device in her hands, and when i finally picked something, she approached me and asked, in not-that-bad-english : "Excuse me, did you ask for a "hand cream"? You know, this picking of any opportunity to train your hearing/speaking is.. amazingly diligent. And their curiosity also amazed me. Ever since i'd like to try move and live there, but.. too bad it's very difficult to go to work or live there. Expensiveness is only one little part of it..
      - 2y ago
- lmm 2y ago
  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.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2y ago
    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.
    - lmm 2y ago
      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.
      - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
        "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")
        sosborn 2y ago
        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?
        junkjunkjunkjun 2y ago
        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.
sour-taste 2y ago
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?
- tkgally 2y ago
  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.
- Phrodo_00 2y ago
  > What do you think Japan should do to encourage Japanese language learning among immigrants? It really boggles my mind how many immigrants to a place (because it doesn't just happen in Japan) are fine not trying to learn the language, especially if the place doesn't even understand the languages you know. You'd think living in such a place would be enough encouragement (it certainly would be for me), but I keep seeing stories about immigrants in several places not bothering to learn a common language of where they live.
wdutch 2y ago
> 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.
- sodfj11240 2y ago
  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.
  - unrealhoang 2y ago
    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.
    - mc3301 2y ago
      yeah, the novelty approach to English is one of the things that is inherently holding back Japan from any generally decent level of English.
einichi 2y ago
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.
sien 2y ago
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.
- minebreaker 2y ago
  To be fair, it's much easier to learn English if your mother tongue is a variant of Indo-European.
  - tkgally 2y ago
    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.
    - eszed 2y ago
      > it seems to be easier for people to learn another language when they already know two or three. Yes, that's empirically verified by multiple studies. My pet theory about that is that a great deal of one's psychological sense of self is tied to one's ability to communicate with others. Learning a new language entails "letting go", to a great extent, of a linguistic sense of self. (Peter Hessler writes perceptively and humourously about this in one of his early books.) People who speak more than one language have either a) gone through this process (as adults) already, and can negotiate it more easily, or b) have (as dual-native speakers) a self-perception that is less-rigidly tied to a particular language context. This is also why people who are highly articulate in their native tongue often progress more slowly than people who are not. I have more than once been humbled by someone who (natively) speaks what I'd (in my academic arrogance) judge to be "bad English" zooming ahead of me in foreign language acquisition. I'm concerned about being "correct", while they burble away unconcernedly and leave me far behind. Those experiences have been good for my character. :-) See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42077992, down-thread a bit, who makes this point better than I did.
SiVal 2y ago
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.
- tkgally 2y ago
  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.
  - SiVal 2y ago
    It's a little sad, but you're right of course that many books no longer make business sense now that everything they offer is online and free. Well, when the AIs put us all out of business and we're home all day in our rabbit hutches, we'll have plenty of time and free content to read.
CarVac 2y ago
I just visited Japan and found the language situation around tourists was frankly perplexing. With some tourists, English was a lingua franca. I ran across some Chinese tourists asking some non-English speaking white tourists (French maybe?) a question in English and not being able to communicate. With others, Japanese was the interchange language of choice, such as with some Taiwanese tourists. For native Japanese people speaking English, it was invariably a huge relief for them to fall back to speaking in Japanese with me. Even those with excellent English pronunciation were like this too. Only once did I feel weird speaking Japanese, with a hotel receptionist who turned out to be Korean.
KTallguy 2y ago
Thank you for the article! I’m an American who’s lived on and off in Japan for around 10 years, currently in Tokyo working in game development. I related to many parts of your article, especially the later part about foreign devs working with Japanese executives. My work environment aims to be multilingual (Japanese/English) but creative conversations are inevitably stymied by pauses for translation. Machine translation and AI is helpful but fails to capture nuance, and compounds normal, everyday communication woes. Japanese only speakers on our team feel lonely and left out despite best efforts. Japanese applicants are quite rare because of the stress of being in such an environment. It’s exhausting when people around you don’t share common cultural touchstones and every conversation is an unpredictable exchange. On the other side, although many of my non-Japanese colleagues speak varying levels of Japanese, some have tried but are unable to (or don’t care to) improve further. Working proficiency is a high bar, and our “real work” is busy. You can get by in Tokyo with cursory Japanese, translation apps and online reservations. There is a large expat community, so you can ignore the “Japan for Japanese people” if you so choose. I wonder how things will change as the native population continues to shrink over the years. Even in Tokyo, many businesses have responded to the tourist explosion by insulating themselves in various ways. There are recent incidents related to concentrated immigrant populations as well. I hope that we avoid the xenophobic trend that is sweeping the rest of the world but I do worry.
- tkgally 2y ago
  Thanks for the comments! I have been following developments in MT and AI as close as I can and have been interested in how well MT works—or doesn’t—in real-life situations, but I don’t get much opportunity to experience such situations myself. Your description of your work environment is really valuable to me. Your report about some of your non-Japanese colleagues not making much progress with Japanese matches my own experience in academia. A few years after I started working at the university, we began hiring a steady stream of youngish academics from around the world to teach academic writing classes in English to undergraduates. Some of them already had good Japanese ability, and the others all started out wanting to learn. But being busy with teaching and research and being able to get by in Tokyo with just English meant that few of the latter group made much progress beyond basic conversation. The language is hard, adult life is busy, and acquiring languages gets steadily harder for most of us as we get older. I also wonder about how Japan will change and adapt as the native population continues to decrease. At the government and business levels, the overall response to the growing foreign population seems to be a slow shift toward adaptation. Among the general population, it’s hard for me to tell.

skhr0680 2y ago

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.

lmm 2y ago
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.
- skhr0680 2y ago
  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.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Meh. Poor priority in schooling and teaching to the test are hardly unique to Japan.
    - skhr0680 2y ago
      "Other countries have problems too" OK, let's just give up trying to improve then.

shermantanktop 2y ago

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?

rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
In my experience, exceptional English-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming English media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  IMX, exceptional ${LANGUAGE}-learners almost exclusively learn independently, from consuming ${LANGUAGE} media or interacting with native speakers, not from courses.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  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.

avsudhficc 2y ago

In my opinion, in general: - You must learn the language of the country hosting you (if you live there for any extended period). - Learning a language is really hard, so I don’t expect everyone to reach fluency. But you must put significant, persistent effort into it. - Countries should protect their languages, and should resist the urge to Anglicize everything.

minebreaker 2y ago

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 http://blog.tatsuru.com/2024/10/11_1037.html [1]: http://blog.tatsuru.com/2018/10/31_1510.html http://blog.tatsuru.com/2018/10/31_1510.html

bulbosaur123 2y ago

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.

okeuro49 2y ago
People don't find authoritarian communism aspirational.
- tigrezno 2y ago
  same will be said about conservative authoritarians in the US for next 20 years lol
jsemrau 2y ago
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.
twiceaday 2y ago
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.

majikaja 2y ago

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.

dangsux 2y ago
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dangsux 2y ago

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laurieg 2y ago

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.

anal_reactor 2y ago
> 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.

SpecialistK 2y ago

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.

TulliusCicero 2y ago
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).

m463 2y ago

> 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?

tkgally 2y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073152

baruchthescribe 2y ago

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.

ekusiadadus 2y ago

I'm Japanese. Speaking English in Japan is very challenging. All my friends and family speak Japanese, and everything from social media to news is completely accessible in Japanese. I'm an entrepreneur, and I use English when talking with international clients and overseas VCs. However, I lack confidence, and the communication tends to remain superficial, making it difficult to effectively do business internationally. In this environment, it's hard to feel a real necessity to communicate in English. Since elementary school, we've been told that being able to speak English is extremely important, and I studied hard. Yet in this environment, there are rarely opportunities to actually use English. When foreigners tell us about the importance of English, they may not fully understand that it doesn't really matter much to most Japanese people. Japanese people might start speaking English when they truly need it. Rather than that, I'd be happier if AI could provide real-time translation for everything.

tomcam 2y ago
Your written English is excellent. You are underestimating your skills, I think. Is there a world in which you could simply pause and plan out your words before speaking? Westerners won’t mind. Elon Musk often pauses noticeably in interviews when he’s discussing something controversial or novel, for example. I retrained myself how to speak in my 20s and went through a similar process.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  In general just pausing without saying eeuuh will make you smarter.
- Smar 2y ago
  Spoken English is completely different language from written English. Even more so with native speakers.
germandiago 2y ago
I have been a couple of times in Japan, have some Japanese friends here in Vietnam, where I live. I am spanish. In my humble opinion, japanese society is very kind and well-behaved, but, if you cannot speak japanese and you live in one more-or-less big city, according to all the feedback I got, then, you are basically out. And anyway, you will never be a japanese. I mean, there is much less difference between foreigners entering Spain, in general terms, and foreigners entering in Japan. I love Japan, but I am not sure it would be a particularly comfortable place to live since Japanese have a very traditional culture and habits, so being part of the group is not an easy task. In fact, I think you will never be a part of the group as I would understand it in spanish terms, when, for example, an argentinian or a romanian becomes in Spain over time. The japanese culture is one one of the cultures I admire the most in many aspects: disciplined, orderly... but one thing is that and a very different thing is living there and becoming fully integrated. I think that's tough.

throw78311 2y ago

I posit that Japan is able to keep its "exoticness" (to much of the world) as a culture because the cultural osmosis that comes from having a populace with good English skills promotes homogenization. I imagine a Japan that's highly fluent in English will look a lot more similar to S. Korea. I might go to extend this theory and say the quality of English literacy in Japan is intentionally kneecapped at some level in an attempt to retain their cultural identity, even if unconsciously.

CarVac 2y ago

I just went on vacation to Japan and it was fascinating how much relief even the competent English-speakers there seemed to show when I would speak with them in my semi-fluent (vocab-deficient though) Japanese. There are translations everywhere, on signs and in museums (those are fascinating because the translations omit 80% of the detail since foreigners will lack historical contextual knowledge) but I got the feeling that with the exception of accommodating tourists, there's never any use for most natives to ever speak English.

ggm 2y ago

"Year of living Danishly" [0] is this but for English -> Denmark. Neighbours who knock on your door to explain you are putting the rubbish bin out wrongly in the street and it concerns them. My sense of Denmark changed after reading this book, to one which included 'very high expectations of social conformity' which in some ways, matches Japan. (ok. not this exactly because not primarily language focussed but there is topic drift in this thread) [0] The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country - Helen Russell

reactivematter 2y ago

Language is a technology to communicate thoughts. Over time it has become an important cultural aspect, but it should be treated firstly as a technology. Over time as technologies evolve and people adapt to it, with globalization there is no escape from the requirement of a common language (_lingua franca_). Though English serves a default common language due to the colonization era, I don't see any serious attempts by big nations (I mean population wise) to develop a common language that all can claim their own. Without this, in another 100 years, despite united by globalization and web technologies, knowledge barriers will continue to remain due to different languages.

majikaja 2y ago

What is there to integrate into? Adult life is mostly just going to work to pay the bills. I don't know anyone with a particularly interesting life outside of their job. Most Japanese people aren't going to be any less apathetic about a foreigner than others of their own group. Naturally there will be more traction with those looking for free English teachers and gaijin hunters. What a larger proportion of people likes is money and entertainment. Not so much foreigners trying to be Japanese. A foreigner giving such vibes will always be lower down in social status than the natives.

majikaja 2y ago
If you want to be respected (but not 'integrate') as a foreigner by traditional society in Japan it's good to work at a prestigious place where there are few Japanese people such as an embassy. Failing that a gaishikei company that sounds foreign to people who don't know better but isn't (likely >90% Japanese). Or just be rich (this may also involve being very picky or completely averse to working with the native population).
- majikaja 2y ago
  I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed if they go to Japan expecting the same social structures they enjoyed in the west to exist in the same form, just hidden somewhere behind the language barrier. Don't even expect the drinks after work culture, a lot of that has disappeared. It was a thing when people actually had hopes that showing loyalty to a company would improve their lives. If you want to enjoy life just watch videos of expats chilling in places Thailand for inspiration. Otherwise you may become like the Japanese people and end up bored and wanting to leave.
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