Thanks for the comments! I have been following developments in MT and AI as close as I can and have been interested in how well MT works—or doesn’t—in real-life situations, but I don’t get much opportunity to experience such situations myself. Your description of your work environment is really valuable to me.

Your report about some of your non-Japanese colleagues not making much progress with Japanese matches my own experience in academia. A few years after I started working at the university, we began hiring a steady stream of youngish academics from around the world to teach academic writing classes in English to undergraduates. Some of them already had good Japanese ability, and the others all started out wanting to learn. But being busy with teaching and research and being able to get by in Tokyo with just English meant that few of the latter group made much progress beyond basic conversation. The language is hard, adult life is busy, and acquiring languages gets steadily harder for most of us as we get older.

I also wonder about how Japan will change and adapt as the native population continues to decrease. At the government and business levels, the overall response to the growing foreign population seems to be a slow shift toward adaptation. Among the general population, it’s hard for me to tell.