[tkgally]

Your Japanese coworkers are the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of Japanese speakers in Japan, including those in technical fields, do all of their work communication in Japanese. They may use technical vocabulary borrowed from English and other languages, but those words are used with Japanese pronunciation in Japanese sentences.

[kmeisthax]

In Masahiro Sakurai[0]'s series of YouTube talks[1] on game development, he specifically mentions how he has to tell Japanese developers to always name files and source code functions in English, just in case they need to work with an overseas team.

Yes, it is possible to do everything 100% in Japanese, with the only English being the keywords of whatever programming system you are working with. However, that is more the exception than the rule, especially in larger teams that need to work overseas.

[0] Creator of Super Smash Bros. and Kirby

[1] "Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games"

[rtpg]

Even teams that work with overseas teams tend to funnel that through several people or the like (this is universal). Even "english only" companies in Tokyo will still just have a bunch of docs/convos written in Japanese when the team compositions are not uniformly mixed.

There are of course aesthetic/logistics reasons behind "code the stuff in English" (if only cuz your code is going into an ASCII codepage, and ... yeah, sharing). But the language used in teams is pretty company-culture dependent, and "we do all of our work in English" lands in a very restricted set of companies. Probably Finance is the one where that culture is there, but most tech companies.... there are higher-than-average english language levels in these places, but if there's no other English-preferer (foreigners, but also returnees or people who just like English a lot) in the room? Not happening

[larryliu]

I asked them why. They said it's possible to say anything in Japanese, but English has the brevity for some topics.