[Larrikin]

Unless you speak Japanese, you are interacting with a small minority of people that care about interacting with people outside of Japan. Most people living there think it's great to fine, but still better than other countries and especially their neighbors.

The best analogy I can think of is asking a non passport holding American why don't they learn Japanese to attract business from one of the largest economies in the world.

[inferiorhuman]

Go back 30–40 years and the proposition of an American learning Japanese probably sounds a lot less ridiculous.

[alemanek]

But Americans still didn’t learn Japanese en mass when it looked like Japanese manufacturing was going to conquer the world. Just like they didn’t learn Chinese.

Learning a new language as an adult is incredibly difficult. I have learned Spanish to a basic conversational level and it has been a massive struggle for me.

My Swiss and German friends seem to pick up new languages super easily though. Likely this is because they learned a second, third, or even fourth language as children.

So, not impossible but it is good to acknowledged that this isn’t an easy thing to do and likely would be a generational shift kind of thing.

[inferiorhuman]

American's stubborn insistence on only knowing one language aside, my point is that learning Japanese would've been reasonable perhaps even en vogue.

[jki275]

Japanese is a relatively difficult language to learn.