Japan and the English Olympic Dream

This is the first piece of a series I began in 2017 about how the Tokyo Olympics were meant to catapult Japan’s English proficiency into the 21st century… but somehow didn’t. You may also want to read part 2, part 3, and part 4.

With the coming of the Olympics to Japan in 2020, there is this Dream that has been passed along in official communication as well as in more casual talks between people that goes like this: Tokyo 2020 is the chance for Japan to really open up to the world, and catch up in certain areas where it’s clearly behind. We’re talking about the final deathblow to the fax machine. We’re talking about finally taking on “ijime” (bullying), of which 225,000 cases were still being reported two years ago. We’re talking about people finally being able to talk some, any, English.

I first moved to Japan in the summer of 2011 for almost 3 years. That was a bit of a special time to be in Japan, because 1) the Tohoku earthquake had just happened, and there had been a pretty large exodus of foreigners leaving Japan and 2) the conversation about learning English had kicked up a notch in earnest. Uniqlo and Rakuten, as well as Nissan, had recently announced that they would become English speaking companies in order to be more competitive in the international field. Those first two companies were relatively new kids on the block, and very successful domestically, so they had this aura of disruptiveness that was generally accepted because those initiatives were home-brewed (i.e. not imported or imposed from abroad).

Where are we 6 years later? EF Education First, where I currently work, releases an English Proficiency Index every year that measures the average level of English in each country. The news is not good. Japan went from being 26th in the world in 2013 to 35th in the world in 2016. TOEIC data shows a similar, if less dramatic, trend: we ranked 40th in 2014 and 41st in 2016. So from the data, the situation is not getting better yet, even with the Olympic Dream of turning everyone here into global bilingual citizens.

Numbers aside, what do we see on the ground? I moved back to Japan in January (incidentally, in pursuit of the Dream) and here are some of the changes I’ve noticed since I first came here 6 years ago.

• The Wild East is dead — When I first arrived every day was an adventure because every decision made was a bit of a gamble. Not knowing any Japanese when I first arrived, I never really knew if I was buying flour or detergent at the supermarket because the packaging was so similar and I didn’t know the characters. I would buy two different rice triangles at the convenience store because if I bought just one I would always end up with the plum one, which I hated.
• But now that’s over. Those rice triangles now have a small English translation, and otherwise it’s a lot easier to ask the people at the convenience store for help.Those workers have mostly changed. In post-earthquake Japan they were usually young Japanese people. Now, they are mostly immigrants and they’re a lot more ready to communicate with whatever tools they got. I’m not saying their level of English is better than their Japanese counterparts (I have no idea), but perhaps since they have experienced the struggle first-hand they’ve made the realization that you literally can’t begin to communicate unless you give it a shot.
• Besides that, I think another reason the “Wild East” experience is no longer replicable is because of technology: firstly in that general way in which technology reduces our need to actually talk to other people, but also in a context specific way, like the possibility of now being able to point a phone at some Japanese text and get an instant, generally accurate translation.
• The Gaijin (foreigner) Effect has waned — Gone are the days where my mere entrance at a local store would strike fear into the heart of the shopkeeper. This is not an exaggeration — you could feel the tension increase as I walked through the door. I always imagined it came from a good place: as a culture with such a big emphasis on hospitality, the fear of not being able to communicate with a customer in order to deliver top-of-the-line customer service according to protocol would be paralyzing. This too has changed. More and more businesses have become used to dealing with foreigners, even those mom-and-pop stores without immigrant workforce, and have come to realize that in order for the customer to get what they want (which is great customer service) sometimes it’s necessary to go off script sometimes.
• Similarly, the Gaijin Smash is no longer as effective. That move that foreigners (especially those who actually lived in Japan) could do to avoid following certain rules or norms because “I can’t read the sign” or “Sorry I don’t speak Japanese,” which was powerful then because it was preferable to inconvenience everyone else over having to tell that foreign guy that the thing he was sitting on wasn’t in fact a chair, is no longer. Japanese people are more experienced and more capable of taking that first step to try and fix the trouble or inconvenience, even if there’s a Gaijin in front. I also don’t see as many Gaijin trying this stuff as much anymore.
• Despite all that, the English thing is still not really working out yet. In fact, based on what I’m experiencing, it feels that foreigners’ Japanese level has massively improved while I was gone. When I walk on the streets I see so many foreigners speaking fluent Japanese, from young mixed couples to moms chatting with each other when they pick up their kids from school. The other day in Harajuku I saw a Chinese boy run up to a girl and ask her if she was Korean and could they be Instagram friends. The exchange was in Japanese!
• The numbers kiiind of support what I’m seeing. Here’s a chart of the number of people who have signed up for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test since 2010 (using their data). The number is increasing for all levels of proficiency except for the N1 (the highest level of proficiency), which seems to be going down and sort of goes against what I’m saying, but I think that once the data comes out we’ll see that 2016 and 2017 are higher than 2015. The data also shows that the majority of N5 test-takers live outside Japan (20:1) whereas that proportion decreases with each higher proficiency level (at N1 the proportion is only 3:1).

• Anyway, it’s more important to focus on the cumulative number. Since 2010 until 2015, almost 2 million more people learned Japanese at a high conversational level (N1 + N2), and if you extrapolate from the data we can say that by the end of this year that number will go up by another million. That’s a lot of new Japanese speakers!

• Of course, this is overall a good thing. Learning the local language is generally part and parcel of living abroad and this wouldn’t really be a discussion in many other countries. In Japan, maybe because of the Gaijin Effect, or maybe because it’s a really friggin hard language to learn, people had a bit of a pass. But it’s almost as if people believed that this Englishnization (to borrow Rakuten’s word) wasn’t going to really happen so it’s better to finally bite the bullet and learn the local language
• The other side of the coin is that Japan is getting used to this. Employers now generally demand their foreign workers to have N1 fluency, whereas before N2 was more widely accepted. Again, a good thing, since this should lead to higher productivity and so on, but it would be a shame if this rise in Japanese fluency is perceived as an acceptable substitute for the need to increase English proficiency around the country. The Rakutens and the Uniqlos will continue to demand English-speaking workers, but if the motivation for Japanese individuals to learn English is now lower, those companies might end up hiring foreigners who can already speak English and Japanese fluently.