Bilingual in Japan, also studying Mandarin.

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.

Lovely article.

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?

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.

> 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.

> I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business.

Just curious what your suspicions were at the English conversation lounge and why it made you uncomfortable?

How do you think it compares to various European countries?

Say, Germany, Spain, Italy (or any that you're familiar with).

Northern Europeans seem to be fantastic at learning languages. It's surprising the rest of the world doesn't copy what they do.

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.