For more than forty years, I have been trying to understand the role of English in Japan. Over my first two decades in this country, I went from one extreme to the other: from seeing English as important here, to regarding it as a niche, inessential aspect of Japanese life.
My views changed yet again after I switched careers in 2005 and started working full time at the University of Tokyo. I gradually came to realize that English’s role in Japan is more nuanced and complex than I had imagined.
Now, with increased immigration from multiple countries, new roles for international developers in the tech industry, and the advent of AI, English’s place in Japan is transforming yet again. New questions have entered a long-standing debate, including:
- Should English remain the focus of Japan’s foreign language education?
- Is it possible for language education based on machine translation or AI to be instituted “fairly” in Japan?
- Can English-speaking workers build careers in Japanese-speaking companies?
These dilemmas may be modern, but their roots run deep, for the role of English in Japan has always been a controversial subject. To properly understand English’s evolving role in this country, it’s necessary to delve into the past—in this case, when I landed in Japan in 1983.
English in Japan is essential
My first months here, I realize now, led me astray. I knew no Japanese when I arrived in August of 1983. Unable to read the signs in train stations, few of which were in English then, I took a slow local train from Narita to Ueno, where an American friend was to meet me.
After a couple of hours I reached Ueno and called my friend, and he took me to a “gaijin house” in Setagaya, where I would stay for the next month. The landlord’s English was weak, but everyone else staying there—an Israeli artist, two bar hostesses from the Philippines, a Polish sailor who had jumped ship in Yokohama and was seeking asylum in Japan, and a Japanese college student living there for the international experience—could all speak English well.
In the weeks ahead, nearly everyone I met either spoke English or wanted to learn. A few days after I arrived, the landlord introduced me to an English conversation lounge in Takadanobaba. I would go there, chat with the customers in English for a few hours, and get paid 5000 yen. I quit after a couple of sessions, as the place made me uncomfortable; I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business. But on the surface at least, everyone was there to speak English.
My subsequent regular jobs—working as an editor at a small publishing company in Yoyogi, teaching at a conversation school in Shinjuku—were also focused on English. Those jobs existed because Japanese companies needed to publish PR materials in English and because Japanese individuals were willing to pay money to learn English from an American.
My media consumption, which included the Japan Times and Daily Yomiuri, U.S. armed forces radio, Time magazine, and Hollywood movies, was also entirely in English. All of the friends I made, both Japanese and foreign, spoke English too.
English in Japan is peripheral
Six months after I arrived, my views began to change. I started taking classes at a Japanese language school in Harajuku five mornings a week. I had been interested in foreign languages since high school and had majored in linguistics in college and graduate school, but this was my first opportunity to study a language in a country where it was spoken. Except for an evening English teaching job, I spent nearly all of my time either attending Japanese classes or practicing kanji and memorizing vocabulary on my own.
After two years of intensive work, I became able to use the language pretty well. Using my reading skills, I started freelancing as a Japanese-to-English translator. While I continued to teach English part-time, translation would be my main career for the next two decades.
In some ways, working as a translator reinforced my impression that English was important in Japan. After all, most of my clients—Japanese companies and government agencies—paid me good rates to translate their product brochures, advertisements, video scripts, and speeches into English. Clearly, English had economic value to them.
A client might pay me to translate their corporate brochure into English, but when it was done they would have only a hundred copies printed, while their Japanese brochure had print runs in the thousands. A national theater paid me to translate synopses of its plays. My translation took up only one page out of thirty-two in the printed program—all the rest were in Japanese, as, of course, were the plays themselves. An oil company paid me to produce English spec sheets for the lubricants they supplied to Japanese car factories overseas. While the 30 or so types of engine oil and grease seemed like a lot, they accounted for less than 10% of the company’s line of lubricants. Yes, English had some economic value in Japan, but it was dwarfed by the much greater importance of Japanese.
Learning Japanese and freelancing as a translator meant that I had transitioned to living most of my life in Japanese as well. My two daughters grew up with Japanese as their first language. When they were small I tried to speak only English with them, but once they entered the local elementary school I often had to switch to Japanese so that we could talk about what they were learning. Since all my clients were Japanese, I rarely had to speak English for my translation work. In my evening English classes I did speak to my students only in English, but other than that, and some short trips to the U.S. every year or two to visit family, I was rarely immersed in an English-speaking environment.
English in Japan is complicated
In 2005, I was hired by the University of Tokyo, and I spent my first few years at the university helping to develop and manage a course on science writing in English for first-year undergraduates. Most of the science majors there go on to careers in research or industry, and the university wanted them to learn how to structure and write a research paper in English, the lingua franca of the sciences.
Their lukewarm attitude toward English contrasted strongly with messaging from both educational leaders and the government about the importance of English skills in the “age of globalization.”
Working at the university also gave me broader exposure to English education throughout Japan. I often visited other universities and talked with the English educators there. While the students at other top universities were similar in English ability and interest to those at UTokyo, the situation at second-tier and third-tier universities was quite different. Not only did the incoming students have weaker English competence, their interest in becoming fluent was also much lower. With few exceptions, they did not see English as useful to them now, nor did they expect to need or want to be able to use English in the future. Though the students were required to take English classes for a year or two, the level was usually quite basic, and few of those students would graduate with significant English ability.
In the 1950s and 1960s, rock and pop music from the U.S. and U.K., Hollywood movies, and American TV shows had played an outsized role in Japanese life. Many older fluent English speakers I have known acquired their ability mainly through a youthful obsession with some form of English media. While occasionally I still meet college students intensely focused on, say, hip hop or American TV dramas, young people in Japan today seem much more content with the pop culture of their own country.
English in Japan is controversial
My perspective broadened further a few years after I joined UTokyo, when I started teaching and doing research in its graduate school. I began to advise graduate students on their research in language education, and I chose topics related to English education for my graduate seminars. I became especially interested in controversies that have persisted in Japan about English education for more than a century.
Those controversies revolve around fundamental questions. Should all children be required to study English in school? If so, at what age should English study begin? Is the primary goal for studying English to become able to use the language for practical purposes? Or should the language be studied more for personal enrichment? Should English teaching emphasize grammar and vocabulary, or focus more on communication? Is it better for teachers and students to use Japanese in the classroom, or should they speak only English? How should English ability be assessed for university admission and employment?
While people still disagree on those issues, government policy and the educational system have largely reached a consensus.
The national curriculum calls for English to be taught only in English, though many teachers continue to use Japanese in the classroom. Educators remain divided about the role of testing, but most seem to believe that tests like EIKEN, TOEIC, and high school and university entrance examinations measure language ability accurately and that higher test scores are an appropriate target to aim for when studying English.
In recent years, though, cracks have appeared in that consensus. Around the late 2010s, the government proposed adding a new section to the English part of the common university entrance examination, which was called the Center Exam and was taken by a half million people on the same day each year. The test already assessed English vocabulary, grammar, and reading and listening comprehension, but to encourage high schools to emphasize speaking in class more, the government planned to add a speaking component to the test.
However, the proposal ran into fierce objections on both pedagogical and logistical grounds. Because most Japanese children had no immediate need to speak English, it would be better, the opponents argued, to first give them a solid grounding in grammar and vocabulary so that they would be able to speak English correctly if and whenever they needed to. The government’s plan to outsource the speaking test to private testing companies was also criticized. Those private tests, it was believed, would favor children from wealthier families in urban areas. The opposition proved too much for the government, and the plan was abandoned in late 2019.
A controversial reform that did get enacted was moving the start of regular English classes from age twelve to age ten. Until 2019, English was a required subject beginning in the first year of junior high school. After decades of debate about whether starting English earlier would benefit or harm Japanese children, the government decided to begin English two years earlier, in the fifth year of elementary school. The national curriculum was revised, new textbooks were prepared, and elementary school teachers had to learn how to teach a subject that few of them had been trained for.
English in Japan must be fair
At the heart of the controversies about English education in Japan is an assumption that is rarely questioned or made explicit: whatever policy is decided, it must apply equally to all children. People argued about whether to start English classes at age 12 or 10. The idea of starting some children at 12 and others at 9 or 11 or 13 depending on the individual child’s preferences and abilities was never on the table. Similarly, the speaking component was either going to be added to the Center Exam for all test-takers or for none. Anything else, it was assumed, would be “unfair.”
The need for fairness and uniformity even extends to minutiae such as classroom layout: at nearly every elementary school, children sit at individual desks arranged in rows facing a front blackboard, with the windows to their left. Teachers often try to resist this uniformity and adapt their lessons as much as they can to the specific needs of their students. But their hands are mostly tied, as they still have to prepare their students for the standardized exams that await them in the years ahead.
As a result, English education through high school and even, sometimes, at the university level is basically one-size-fits-all. Although every child learns differently and has their own interests and motivations, educational debates implicitly assume that all children should be taught with the same curriculum and teaching methods at the same pace.
Of course, wealth and social status still affect students’ English education. Parents who can afford it may sign their children up for individual or group lessons from private tutors, or send them to English-focused cram schools. Students who have access to these resources can receive more individualized attention in smaller classroom settings, allowing them to not only study beyond the normal school curricula, but also to learn more efficiently. This disparity is one reason why the expansion of the Center Exam was so vehemently opposed on grounds of “fairness”—low-income families simply don’t have these options.
The uniformity of the education system also contrasts with the diversity of Japan’s society and economy. Some adults in Japan do indeed need English—in their work or in their personal lives—and of course some people who went through the Japanese education system later live overseas, where ability in English is often very helpful. Such people complain about how inadequate school-taught English has been for them.
On the other hand, most Japanese people never leave Japan; currently, fewer than one-fifth of Japanese citizens even have a passport. While some of them work for companies with an international presence and need to use English domestically, as shown by the social scientist Takunori Terasawa, the majority of them never use English. Most soon forget nearly everything they learned in school.
English in Japan isn’t enough
Another problem with the foreign language educational policy is that it remains focused on English, while Japan is steadily becoming a multilingual society. Recent statistics from the Ministry of Justice paint a revealing picture: of the nearly three million foreign residents in Japan at the end of 2023, the largest group by far consists of Chinese citizens, numbering over 820,000 and growing at nearly 8% annually. The second-largest group comprises Vietnamese residents, with more than 565,000 people and a robust growth rate of 15.5%.
Particularly striking are the growth rates among some smaller but rapidly expanding communities. Indonesia’s resident population surged by over 50% in a single year, while Myanmar’s grew by nearly 54%. The Nepali community expanded by more than 26%. In contrast, the number of U.S. citizens in Japan—around 63,000—grew by just 4.3%.
English in Japan is changing
Meanwhile, advances in technology are transforming both language use and language needs. Around 2016, advances in machine translation (MT) started to challenge assumptions about the practical need for English. Some Japanese people wondered if the effort to learn English was really worth it when they could just use Google Translate or a smartphone interpreting app. But the education system was very slow to adapt to the improvements in MT. As late as 2022, when I searched the website of the Ministry of Education for machine translation (機械翻訳, kikai honyaku), I found no mention of the technology’s implications for English education.
Such issues have been amplified by the appearance of large language models. One of the most attractive applications for today’s AI is creating interactive learning experiences tailored to the individual student.
The insistence from teachers, students, parents, administrators, and broader Japanese society that education be delivered “fairly” will make it very difficult to adopt truly individualized AI-based tutoring, guidance, or assessment into schools, as students will no longer seem to be progressing through the same material at the same pace.
English in Japan at work
In the technology sector, today’s reality is complex: while many Japanese tech companies officially promote English use and seek international talent, the daily work environment often operates primarily in Japanese.
To address this issue, some companies aim to switch entirely to English, while others, like Givery and Cybozu, have created in-house, English-speaking multinational developer teams. Even within the same company, however, practices can vary sharply between departments, and there’s frequently a language gap between English-speaking developers and the Japanese executives who manage them.
The advent of AI translation tools is also changing the landscape. Many companies now use them for documentation and communication, though their effectiveness varies depending on the context.
English in Japan: my advice
Looking back over the four decades since that hot August day when I stumbled onto the local train to Ueno, my understanding of English in Japan has evolved from seeing it as either central or peripheral to recognizing its nuanced role.
The most successful international professionals I’ve observed are those who remain flexible about language use, taking advantage of English when possible while gradually developing their Japanese skills. When looking into the labor shortage, TokyoDev found that many companies are specifically seeking senior-level candidates with excellent communication skills, even in Japanese.
Beyond the tech sector, the manufacturing and service industries are increasingly dependent on immigrant labor. Japanese respondents to a 2023 government survey rated Japanese language ability as the most important skill for those foreign workers, and a law passed in 2019 aims to comprehensively promote policies related to Japanese language education, creating an environment where foreign residents in Japan can conduct their daily lives alongside native Japanese-speaking citizens.
Understanding how English is learned and used in Japan can also help you work more effectively with Japanese colleagues. Many of them studied English primarily through textbook study and test preparation, with limited opportunities for natural communication. This background often explains why some colleagues or clients, despite years of English study, may be hesitant to speak English in meetings or social situations, while being more comfortable with written English in documentation or email. Being aware of this context can help you better support your colleagues and build stronger working relationships.
The tech sector, with its international outlook and need for global talent, may well lead the way in developing more flexible approaches to language use in Japan. Until then, understanding that companies’ attitudes and practices have been shaped by the complex, often contradictory status of English in Japan may help you make informed decisions about where and how to build your career.
