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.
Ah, I thought your name sounded familiar! In 2008, I bought "Reading Japanese with a Smile" on a trip to Japan and loved it. It was very well done and perfect for me. I ended up buying two copies and for years I kept checking on Kinokuniya visits hoping it would become a series. No such luck, but my guess is it was just too much work for too little reward. But you should know that a HN reader still remembers your work fondly after 16 years.
Thank you for the kind words! I am glad to hear that you found that book useful.
The editor and I did discuss a sequel and I started collecting material for it, but I had changed careers by that point and no longer had the time or motivation to see it through to completion. And now I’m not sure if there’s a market for such books anymore. At least, if I were learning to read Japanese myself now, rather than buying a book of annotated readings I would choose my own texts and ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini about the parts I don’t understand.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> The notion of “fairness” dominates English education policy in Japan. Because of the importance of educational credentials in Japanese life, any policy that seems to favor one group or another—the rich, the urban, children with highly-educated parents, or children who happen to have acquired English fluency on their own—will attract popular opposition.
I teach ESL in Vietnam. The above quote boggles my mind. I've taught disadvantaged rural students and urban students with educated parents. Of course I tried my absolute best for the rural students, I worked a lot harder for them than for the privileged students. However, it would be madness to hamstring the students who happen to be privileged. Holding the whole country to the lowest common denominator doesn't benefit the country at all.
I thought Vietnam was very Confucian and uniform but Japan seems even more extreme. Maybe Vietnam also applies Marx's doctrine of "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" to offset it.
Thanks for your great write up on this topic. This was a very interesting read for me.
Not really, there's little to almost no difference in English literacy between Viet, Korea & China. Yet there's a big gap compare to Japan, the reason is either culture and economic incentive rather than because of the native script.
In Japanese TV, you can even see that for influencers (idols, singers, comedians) being bad in English is considered a cute "feature", this is uniquely apply to Japan.
Japan was sealed off from the world by the Tokugawa Shogunate and only opened back up relatively recently (~150 years ago). So yeah, their culture is kinda built different to the rest of Asia, having evolved for centuries in isolation. They are still prone to exceptionalism: one story goes that European ski equipment manufacturers had difficulty exporting their skis to Japan in the 1960s because of a widespread belief that "Japanese snow is different" and Western skis would not work on it. So while the Chinese readily learn English in order to conduct trade with Westerners, there is an unconscious expectation among Japanese that potential foreign trade partners learn Japanese.
Partly it was the location: An upper floor of a building in a neighborhood full of bars and pachinko parlors, which seemed much sleazier to me then than it would now.
But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.
In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.
Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like that are actually doing among Japanese though.
When I was hanging out in bars there, young women would approach me and beg: "Teach me Englishu!" They saw that I was white and foreign and figured I could just pour English fluency into their heads.
As for the personal questions -- yeah, I've undergone enough foreign-language instruction to understand that these are things people resort to just to have something to talk about. One question that kept coming up was "Who is your favorite singer?" Just about everyone who asked me this also provided their own answer to the question and it was always the same -- Lady Gaga. (The album Born This Way had just dropped in Japan at the time and Lady Gaga was all the rage -- bigger than One Piece, even.)
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..
Yeah, I went to a frozen yogurt place and scraped together enough Japanese to ask if there was an English speaker. They brought before me the store manager, a 22-year-old girl fresh out of college who'd spent a year in California as an exchange student and was super over the moon to be speaking to a real American once again. It was super cute, and we just stood there and talked about random stuff for several minutes before I realized I still wanted frozen yogurt and didn't know how to operate the machines or pay for my order.
I did the same thing and seized any opportunity to practice. I spent a lot of evenings that vacation in bars, just speaking to locals so I could git gud enough in Japanese to... function at a basic level there. I think I gained more Japanese language levels during those two weeks than I did my three semesters of collegiate study of the language.
It's lovely to visit, but unless Rakuten or Nintendo or somebody offered me a too-good-to-pass-up career opportunity, I couldn't foresee myself living in Japan. It's pricey, and as a white dude I would always be seen as an outsider (the literal translation of gaijin) with attendant social disadvantages: I couldn't live or work in certain places, more paperwork and bureaucratic hoops I'd need to jump through, the funny looks and people hiding from me (not so much a problem in Osaka but I hear it happens in Tokyo a lot).
Oh, you know those radio DJ booths in Splatoon where you can look through the plate glass and see the hostesses making their broadcast? Those are actual things in Japan. I passed by one in Doutonbori and the radio hosts started making remarks about the funny foreigner. Yay.
I’ve only visited once, but my impression of their urban areas was that Japanese zoning laws and planning permit are very different to even UK ones, and worlds apart from American ones. I assume there’s some centuries-old historical reasons that I’m just not aware of.
There are residential houses sandwiched between restaurants, perfectly legitimate businesses built on top of some ‘perfectly legitimate’ businesses and underneath other even shadier businesses. This definitely means that any district with a focus on entertainment will often seem sketchier than it really is.
A lot of english conversation in Japan functions as de-facto paid compansionship. It's not exactly a front for escorting, but it's not completely not that either. In the west there tends to be a clear sharp line between customer service and sex work, whereas in Japan there is much more of a sliding scale from paying by the hour to hang out in a bar with friendly bar staff, to having more flirty conversations with them, through clothed touching to what's essentially a strip club experience.
15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".
You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.
There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.
I likened it (and my later work a the token gaijin in a large company), as being a pet, or a zoo animal. Treated well, but never integrated. I was told that I could never be a manager in my company, because it would make Japanese people anxious to have a foreign boss.
The states does have breastauraunts like Hooters where you can watch the game and the bartenders and waitresses happen to be flirty and buxom, but they're compensated by tips instead of by the hour.
I almost mentioned Hooters, I think they're the exception that proves the rule - they're seen as unusual and seedy, whereas in Japan that's pretty much the norm for a bar.
"the exception that proves the rule" is such a terrible expression. I do not understand why people use it.
At some point I thought that it absurd on purpose but I had some people explaining me the rationale behind it (there is no rationale - if there is an exception it at best weakens the "rule")
‘Prove’ was historically used as a synonym for ‘test’, which gives the phrase quite a different meaning. Like how ‘result’ is now sometimes used to mean ‘positive outcome’, as in a football fan saying ‘we got a result’
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.
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?
The norm for a bar in Japan is to be like Hooters?
Eh, what? This wasn't my experience at all. I didn't conduct a study, but I was in a good few bars over there, in three different cities. Can you elaborate on what you're referring to here?
In my experience a bar (not a pub/居酒屋, a バー) will frequently be a place that always has female staff working, where those staff will be wearing makeup and at least somewhat attractive clothes and expected to converse with customers. Not always - there are definitely bars focused on music or some hobby or particular kinds of drinks - but often enough that it's what I'd expect if you just said bar.
Think the takeaway was more about the "seediness" aspect of Hooters do to it's being pretty exceptional/unusual in American dining culture.
Hooters is a pretty unique restaurant experience in the US and is therefore considered different/further from the norm and frankly by many seedy. If there were more places like Hooters in the US then this would probably not be true.
The comment was trying to explain that in Japan you have a lot of places that would be analogous to Hooters in the US...so it's not exceptional/not seedy. Maybe not quite the "norm" but common enough to not be really something that gets noticed or have a connotation like "seedy".
But unlike Japan, the education system is the antithesis of fair - as, if I understood correctly, your 4th grade teacher will decide which of the 3 tracks you will follow at 10(!) years of age. This obliterates the possibility of social elevator through education.
I wonder how it is in Japan?
Is it common to have class movement between generations?
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.
> 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. :-)
I don't know if it's the Indo-European thing or not, but it seems that the writing system is a huge obstacle. In Europe I don't even have to understand a language to be able to read text out loud, just learn a very limited set of pronunciation rules. Even Cyrillic/Greek is a more or less 1-1 phonetic mapping.
Japanese use 3 different writing systems but 2 of them are simple phonetic systems. The hard one is kanji which uses Chinese characters, there's really nothing you can do about that except memorize memorize memorize.
It is and it isn't, in my experience teaching ESL. The basics are incredibly easier, as students receive the benefit of cognates and (at least some) similar constructs. However, there's an interesting stage, right around the beginning of intermediate where students tend to become judgemental of the target language: there's a lot of frustrated "well, why doesn't English do it this way?" (It doesn't help at all that English is such a bastardized and inconsistent tongue that their native language's way of doing [whatever] often is more logical / concise / beautiful!) Some students get stuck there and never progress.
I recall very few, if any, Asian-language speakers hitting that particular speedbump. It's like they're prepared for English to be so different from the start that they've already made a psychological shift to English-mode that other learners may struggle to negotiate.
My kid is being raised bilingual English-Finnish. I hope he acquires an interest in linguistics, because when he examines his own language facility he will find fertile ground - a car crash of deeply different languages.
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.
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.