Japan｜Economy ｜Opinion
Why Japanese Companies Going “English Must” Is Just Plain Silly
Imposing a blanket policy forcing everyone in the company to communicate in English is a pointless and misguided move
More and more Japanese companies are facing the imperative to globalize by adopting English as the official company language.
More than a decade ago in 2010, Japanese tech company Rakuten made the news by announcing that the official language at the company would transition to English by 2012. The CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, even coined a word for this policy, calling it “Englishnization.”
Then more big-name Japanese companies started to do the same. Notable names like Fast Retailing, the parent company of Uniqlo, and the auto-manufacturer Honda, among others.
And then, in June 2022, Sharp Co. — which had been acquired by the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer Hon Hai Precision Industry a few years ago in 2016 — also announced the same policy. The new incoming CEO declared that by 2023, official company communications would be in English.
I might be offering an unpopular opinion, but a blanket roll-out of an English-language mandate at Japanese companies without a deeper consideration of the reality of how work gets done is just plain silly.
The reality of English usage in Japanese companies
I speak from experience since I’ve been working at a company that has declared English to be an official company language.
Here’s how the communication is like for the following:
- Meetings
- Presentations and proposals
- Documents
- E-mails
Meeting: When non-Japanese speaking people are present, the rule is to speak English. Yet, what usually happens when we insist on an English-only meeting with departments that aren’t used to English?
The meeting gets stuck.
In the end, everyone starts asking questions in Japanese since no progress is made at all in English.
In other situations, it’s simply inefficient to provide English documents or interpretation at meetings, especially if there is only one person on the team who requires it.
Documents: Most official documents are in both Japanese and English — a more sensible position and a bit of a compromise. This means a lot of translation is being outsourced to translation agencies.
All documents which will eventually be shared with global teams are all written in English — and re-written or translated into Japanese on a need-to basis.
Proposals and presentations: Outside of formal presentations, when we discuss them or share them with other units, the explanation is all done in Japanese — a sort of strange bilingual situation where the text is all in English, but the speaking is all done in Japanese.
During formal proposals, at least within my department, presentation is all done in English. The same cannot be said for other departments.
E-mails: Almost all internal e-mails are in Japanese, with some exceptions. When dealing with other business units that only speak Japanese, the communication is done mostly in Japanese.
Can you work in my company without any Japanese language ability? — I would say, yes — to a certain extent. Some of my colleagues do not speak much Japanese.
But there are caveats — you would need a very supportive English-speaking manager, and you would need a lot of direct support from Japanese-speaking colleagues. Without which, I don’t think you would last very long.
Fact: Most people working in Japan don’t need to use English at work
One thing that foreign commentators often forget is that the English language is too far divorced from the realities of most Japanese workers, who will only ever work with domestic stakeholders and customers.
Now, think of Tanaka-san, a sales representative who works in a Japanese company. His customers and stakeholders are all Japanese. E-mails are all in Japanese. Documents and reports are also in Japanese.
What is the merit of him spending 3–4 hours after work each day learning a language that he will never really need to use, aside from the fact that the company demands that he uses it?
All that effort spent in learning English is pointless from a business standpoint if it doesn’t have any real-life usage on the job.
As I wrote in another article, Why Japan Fails at English:
For most Japanese people, English is just a language that sounds cool — but ultimately — foreign. Since necessity is often the reason people develop a language skill, it stands to reason that most Japanese people don’t have the impetus to develop any working proficiency in the English language.
The penetration of English language use is spotty as best, in companies that implement an English mandate
I’m not just speaking from my experience.
Take the case of Fast Retailing. A business report in Japanese from 2017 — five years after the English official language policy was rolled out — mentioned that according to Fast Retailing employees, the penetration of English language was spotty at best.
In most situations, when only Japanese people are present, the meeting is conducted in Japanese.
Employees also had trouble articulating everything they wanted to say when communication was in English only. One employee interviewed said that she could not even express 50% of what she wanted to say in a meeting carried out in English.
What about Rakuten? From this article in the Financial Times, you might get the impression that everyone at Rakuten is now very fluent in English.
Yet, the reality is probably a bit messier. This article (in Japanese) postulates that some of the problems that have plagued Rakuten are due to an overzealous application of the Englishnization policy, leading to double the time required, lowered efficiency, and communication difficulties — not only for Rakuten staff but their subcontractors as well.
Forcing Japanese people to suddenly use English at work — especially if they have never used it professionally before in their entire life — is like asking you to work in Spanish or French starting from next year, even though the last time you studied it was in college.
Englishnization as a mandatory policy also forgets the role of communication norms
Beyond language skills, Japanese people also prefer to preserve harmony through an indirect style of communication.
On the other hand, English communication tends to be more direct, and this is directly at odds with the norms of Japanese communication and can throw off many Japanese people.
Companies can implement language mandates all they want, but discussions and decisions will always take place in the languages that matter.
And in Japan, since key decisions are usually made unofficially with meetings that are already premeditated (ala nemawashi style), having official meetings in English seems to be another one of those things Japan is famous for — tatemae — or as Timothy Sullivan explains, “the truth for public consumption,” in his article Are Any Cross-Cultural Topics Off-Limits?
People will use whatever language is most natural and most efficient to them — and for most Japanese people, this is the Japanese language.
All of this begs the question — is enforcing an English lingua franca at Japanese companies yet another case of image over substance?
Is it all image over substance?
There’s a simultaneous fear and adoration of English language skills in Japan. One might even call it fetishization. Using English names in brands or using katakana words makes everything sound cooler.
Case in point — modern business Japanese is peppered with English loanwords, to the extent that a samurai lord who had time-traveled from the Edo period would not understand a business conversation full of words like “risuke” (re-schedule), “apō” (appointment), mīting (meeting), and “kyanseru” (cancel).
But that doesn’t mean that most Japanese people are prepared to switch to using English — even with a lot of support and study outside and during business hours.
Sure, there might be some people who suddenly discover they have an aptitude for language learning.
But, for the most part, science has revealed that the older one gets, the harder it is to learn and properly use a language, at least when it comes to grammar — the structure and backbone of any language.
This ability falls off a precipice when a person reaches the age of 18, according to recent research by a research team at Harvard University, reported by Scientific American.
A Japanese person who is reopening their Japanese textbook at the age of 35 or 40 for the first time in 20 years — juggling full-time work and perhaps even familial duties will find it extremely difficult to develop business-level English skills.
Are English mandates an inefficient use of resources?
Ultimately, mandating a blanket “English-Must” policy is a poor use of resources. The amount of time required to send everyone for English-language training, prepare all documents in Japanese and English, hire interpreters for all meetings, and a host of other initiatives is overwhelming.
Much of the needed resources could be invested in other areas like R&D instead. Japanese companies should look at upgrading their IT infrastructure, implementing more efficient enterprise platforms, and beefing up their R&D budgets.
After all, innovation in consumer electronics, automobiles, and industry drove much of the economic growth of Japan in the postwar period, and Japanese companies certainly didn’t obsess with English language skills the same way the prevailing rhetoric does today.
When it comes to the English language, Japanese companies will be forced to play a game of catch-up.
What’s the alternative?
I’m not suggesting that Japanese companies don’t need to improve their English language skills to become more globally competitive.
Neither do I mean that Japanese people shouldn’t bother to learn English. They should; the English language opens doors to more career options and a richer world beyond mainstream Japanese media.
The benefits of adopting the English language in Japanese companies are obvious. With the shrinking Japanese domestic market, the future is in global markets, and along with it, English — the de-facto language of global business, is key.
Adopting the English language also allows Japanese companies to hire global talent. Unfortunately for Japanese companies, the language of global talent is English, not Japanese.
There is also the less obvious but perhaps equally important PR value of communicating to a company’s shareholders and stakeholders that a company is serious about going global.
Indeed, in one of my interview articles, I noted that “Japanese Companies Lack Two Success Factors to Win in the Global Age”— one of them being English competency.
Still, I would argue that there are more efficient and practical methods to achieve the same result. Rather than a blanket “English-Must” policy, Japanese company executives should distinguish between global business units and Japan-domestic business units — the units that must adopt English, and the units that don’t.
An English mandate could then be rolled out for global corporate headquarters, whereas an employee at a sales office in Osaka — who will spend most of the time working with other Japanese colleagues and business partners — will not need English language skills at all, or at least not to the same extent.
At the same time, Japanese companies need to hire more bilingual or even multilingual business professionals and identify potential hires within their companies from early on in their careers.
These are the cultural connectors who have reasonable language skills in English, Japanese, and even other languages and can play the role of bridging different groups at work. They can serve as leaders or facilitators.
In short, I am advocating for a global-track vs a domestic-track career for Japanese companies, which is a far more efficient, practical, and focused approach.
English language skills are not the be-all and end-all of business
The focus on English language ability can also become a distraction. Language is simply a tool of communication. In business — providing value to customers is the end goal.
And value can also be provided through other areas like superior innovation — which, contrary to public perception — Japan is still a leader.
Despite the talk of corporate Japan having lost its ability to innovate, in 2021, Japan was still the number two country in the world, after the US, that put out the greatest number of patents (even as China is fast catching up!)
At the risk of concluding with what might sound like canned corporate speech, English skills should be seen as another resource within a company.
And like any other resource, they need to be managed, allocated, prioritized, and assigned in practical, efficient, and effective ways — and that’s not what an “English-Must” policy in its common incarnation is designed to do.
The author is an editor of Japonica, a Japan-focused publication, but also writes on a wide variety of topics. His key topics of interest are society, culture, modern work, creator economy, and cryptocurrency, with the occasional fictional story, creative piece, or personal essay. Discover his most-read stories here.
