Working in Japan | Language

Working in Japan Makes You Realize Why Japan Doesn’t Need English

I was one of the ignorant until real-life working experience in Japan changed my mind.

Many have probably heard that English isn’t spoken much in Japan. Still, it often takes an actual visit to Japan for visitors to be truly surprised at the lack of English, even in a supposedly global city like Tokyo.

In her recounting of her visit to the capital of Japan, Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi states that:

“I’ve visited most of Europe, and lots of people don’t speak English, which is okay. Most of this is in the smaller cities, barring Paris, where the locals will choose not to speak in English.

However, the image of Tokyo being so international, a business district, and a place that attracts tourists from across the world — it surprised me how lots of places didn’t even have English menus.”

It’s not just Tokyo. Japanese companies — even so-called global ones, are well-known for having poor English skills. For instance, back when I was working in Singapore, I found it slightly quaint that my Japanese boss couldn’t speak English.

I sincerely believed that Japanese companies — and Japan in general — needed to speak more English to succeed globally.

So when I was offered the opportunity to move to Tokyo in 2016 to work at the headquarters of the Japanese company I was then working for, I had wild ideas — the kind that only young people have.

I was going to help the global expansion of the business.

I could read, write, and present in English.

I was going to help the company improve the English proficiency of the staff.

“Japan needs English,” I had thought to myself.

“How else were they going to communicate and compete with the rest of the world, now that English was the de facto lingua franca?” I had thought to myself.

Japan needs English… or Chinese?

Most global business communication today is in English. Scientific papers are mostly published in English. Coming from Singapore, an Anglophone country — at least in the public sphere — I had always felt that I had grown up with an unfair advantage.

Singapore was flourishing economically for various reasons, and one of them was because it had adopted English as the language of government and business to access the wider global community.

Now that I’ve been in Japan for a while, I realize that I was right — about one thing: My ideas had been completely wild. My belief that this Singaporean was going to change the perception of English in Japan was naive, insolent, stupid, foolish — and incredibly off-the-mark.

After moving to Japan, cracks started appearing in my Anglophone worldview. I realized that many Japanese companies were indeed trying to expand their global business. But from my experience, their key priority was not the United States, nor even Europe.

It was China, China, and China.

It was the world’s second-largest market, and companies East and West wanted a piece of the pie. Ironically, even though I had failed high school Mandarin, I ended up using a lot more Mandarin than English. When I first returned home after I had been in Japan for a year, my friends commented that my Mandarin had improved!

My previous view had been too narrow. It had been too Anglocentric. There was a far, far larger world beyond the Anglocentric one that I had taken for granted.

English is good to have, but Japanese is essential

Many English-speaking foreigners move to Japan short-term, to teach English. Unfortunately, they find themselves unable to move out of this position. As Shawn B. Swinger writes in his article,

“Most of us just can’t seem to get out of the English teaching trap. About 20,000 people are working as ALTs in Japan; of those surveyed, 84% are unhappy with their positions.”

As one can imagine, teaching English as an ALT (assistant language teacher) is a very low-valued skill in Japan. Knowing that, I took the much harder route of moving to Japan via a much harder route. (Besides, I don’t look “white” nor speak with an American, British, or Australian accent, so the odds were against me anyway).

Since I was a product manager in a consumer goods company — less responsible for the work itself than coordinating the work — my communication skills had to be up to standard.

I learned a lot and found myself learning new words, phrases, and expressions to cope with the demands of my new working environment. I had to work with Japanese colleagues who spoke only Japanese.

I had to make myself understood to get the job done in Japan.

I had to make sure the factory staff got the memo on what we were trying to produce, and why.

I had to share my opinion and give feedback to the creative team on the visual direction of the new advertisement they had come up with. And mundane things like office gossip to build rapport, and even working with company systems depended on using Japanese.

The more Japanese I learned to use, I more I realized that I didn’t need to use English much at work.

The language training wasn’t free. Working in Japan full-time, primarily in Japanese, in a highly traditional Japanese corporate environment pushed my mental health to the limits, which I explore in the article The Dark Side of the Japanese Virtue of “Gaman”. That said, it set me up with a very good foundation of business Japanese skills which are still absolutely critical in my current role.

Japan still has a large domestic market… for now

It is sometimes easy to forget that despite the decades of economic stagnation that have ailed the Japanese economy, Japan was still the world’s third-largest economy in 2022 — although the IMF is projecting that Germany is close behind and will claim the place of the world’s third-largest economy in 2023.

That’s why, until recently, most Japanese companies could get by playing in the domestic market. Unsurprisingly, companies that have operated primarily domestically do not need English language ability since customers, employees, and all internal and external documentation are in Japanese.

Even foreign companies are not exempt from this dynamic; foreign companies in the Japanese market behave more like Japanese companies as they adapt to local realities.

This is also a key reason why Japanese companies tend to prioritize language ability when hiring foreign staff. This is slowly changing, of course, especially in the field of digital technology, as Japan lacks sufficient skilled tech workers.

Does Japan need English going forward?

At this point, some people often raise their objections. “But hey, I read that some Japanese companies have instituted English as the official company policy — what do you make of that?”

For better or worse, as I have written elsewhere, one only needs to peer beneath the PR language to know that reality is far messier. The fact is that business at these companies would come to a screeching halt if management really insisted on sticking to all the rules surrounding English that they claim to follow.

As the Japanese population continues to shrink, the Japanese economy looks set to continue to fall behind. In fact, S&P Global is projecting that India will overtake both Germany and Japan by 2030. All things being equal, this means that Japan’s economy is expected to fall to fifth place within the decade.

If true, then Japanese companies will need to accelerate their global expansion. The last time I checked, English is still by and large the key global language of business, not Japanese, and unfortunately, not Chinese as well.

Perhaps my English language skills will finally come in handy. After all, I’ve started seeing more foreigners return to Japan post-COVID-19. We even have a few non-Japanese speakers in the office.

A couple of days ago, I had lunch with a new European colleague. We conversed in English. It was the first time in a couple of weeks I had spoken this much English.

The voice coming out of my mouth felt odd and only vaguely familiar, and I struggled to contort my mouth and tongue into the shapes necessary to knit the sounds of the English language into intelligible words. After living in Japan for so long, perhaps I too was getting too used to speaking only Japanese.

“Perhaps it’s finally time for Japan to embrace English,” I mused to myself, as I returned after lunch to my laptop to greet a growing inbox of e-mails filled with a mashup of hiragana, katakana, and Chinese characters.

Want to know more about working in Japan or the intricacies of the Japanese Language? Discover more in my “Working in Japan” and “Japanese Language” series of articles in the link below.

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