Japan and the English Olympic Dream pt. 3
This is the third piece -originally written in 2019 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 1, part 2, and part 4.
Last year I wrote a sequel to an original post about how Japanese people were in fact getting worse at English as more and more foreigners started taking up Japanese. Jamais deux sans trois, as they say, so I thought I would give a short update on things have changed in the last year. With only 9 months left before the Olympics get started, how is the English Olympic Dream going?
Japan’s level of English is still going down.
Last time I reported on the English Proficiency Index without knowing what the 2018 data would say. As predicted, it went down. The scary thing is just by how much it went down. In 2017 Japan was 37th in the world in terms of English ability. In 2018 it plummeted down to 49th. The 2019 data was released earlier this month and Japan had sunk further down to a weak 53rd rank, just below Vietnam. Last year I described the trend as alarming. Now I would describe it as pathetic. I moved back to Japan in 2016 with EF Education First, the official Tokyo 2020 Official Partner for Language Training Services, because I believed in the English Olympic dream, where by 2020 Japan would be a lot more fluent and ready to engage in a global language. This has been an absolute failure at the policy level that is beyond the capabilities of a single private entity to fix.
Meanwhile, the number of Japanese language learners continues to grow. The data for 2019 is not yet out, but based on the July examination data, we can expect an almost 20% increase in the number of people taking the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the only language test that is widely accepted in Japan. Whatever proportion of those people are doing it to get the necessary certification to be able to work in Japan, the absolute number is only growing. It appears that the Japanese are starting to notice. There is a very on-point commercial in which a Japanese couple are walking around a ryokan and all the staff are white, blonde women who speak excellent keigo — the very formal and very difficult to master form of Japanese. At first the Japanese couple are surprised, but by the end of the ad they accept and embrace it. It’s a good reflection of reality: it’s taking so long for the Japanese to learn English that it’s just easier and more efficient for everyone else to learn Japanese, one of the hardest languages in the world.
A middle-down approach
I am unable to say exactly why policy hasn’t changed or succeeded. My guess is that it’s a hot potato that no one wants to touch: schools probably look to the authorities (Ministry of Education) for clear guidelines, and the MOE doesn’t want to engage in a much-needed overhaul, and so it roadblocks any initiatives. During my time at EF engaging with the MOE was slow at the best of times. It’s important that the MOE gets its act together, because the expectation is that this kind of change, much like all change in Japan, should have a top-down directive. In other words, the leaders should explain what to do and how to do it, and the rest will follow. I visited many different schools in different parts of Japan, and I didn’t meet a single teacher who wasn’t open to new ways of making their students more fluent, they just wanted to be told how. The demand is there, but the teachers need more guidance. Sadly, MOE has shown they are not willing to take on the initiative to provide this guidance.
My suggestions is that perhaps the initiative should come not from the very top, but somewhere in the middle, like at the city level. This has worked for communities like the startup scene and the LGBTQ population. Understanding that making the business climate easier for startups in Japan would take a long time if left up to the national government, a few cities (notably, port cities) like Fukuoka, Yokohama, and Kobe have introduced initiatives at the city level to attract entrepreneurs, such as specific access to funding, subsidized office space, subsidized rent, networking and other resources, all with the aim of creating a fledgling startup ecosystem. Fukuoka was one of the first to do this, and was successful, and now more and more cities are trying to emulate it. Creating this ecosystem is that critical bottom-down approach, as it signals and guides future businesspeople on their entrepreneurial journey, but can perhaps serve as a roadmap for inspiring change at a national level. Similarly, while Japan keeps pushing gay rights to the corner, different cities around Japan are providing more and more equal rights to the LGBTQ community, from hospital visitation rights to co-living rights, again meeting a bottom-up demand with top-down initiatives and guidance, which can hopefully be replicated at a large scale throughout the entire country. A middle-down approach, at first, followed by middle-up.
This might be the solution for getting the Japanese to speak better English. Those mayors of cities around Japan who are tired of waiting for the MOE to help them realize their English dream should consider being the ones to lead the charge and focus on getting their local citizens ready to engage with the rest of the world. I have no doubt that the initiative would be welcome by the teachers in those cities, and in the near future, serve as inspiration for the national government.
