[wdutch]

> 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]

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]

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.

[bitwize]

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.

[cavok]

Japanese snow is different, it’s predominantly powder. Different to ski on.

[TinkersW]

hardly unique..Colorado snow is also mostly powder

[gramie]

But that was used as a non-tariff barrier to prevent the import of foreign goods. If I remember correctly, certain groups also tried to stop the import of foreign beef, because "Japanese intestines were longer [shorter?] and couldn't absorb the nutrition well".

[shiroiushi]

The snow is quite different between Honshu and Hokkaido.

[mc3301]

yeah, the novelty approach to English is one of the things that is inherently holding back Japan from any generally decent level of English.