FOCUS
I
t is one way to concentrate minds. Japan’s largest online retailer, Rakuten, has told its employees that they must be fluent in English by 2012. Executives who aren’t up to speed by then will be sacked; rank-and-file workers will find their path to promotion blocked. That tough directive is not the first. Fast-expanding retailer Uniqlo is one of a handful of Japanese companies that have recently made English their internal lingua franca. Sony and Nissan have used it for years. But Rakuten’s initiative by its Harvard-educated founder Hiroshi Mikitani may be the clearest sign yet that Japanese corporations are accepting a long-held truism: for better or worse, English is the language of global business. Unfortunately, the realisation may be too late. Getting good bilingual workers in Japan has never been easy and, despite government rhetoric on the need to internationalise, many say it is getting harder. “Frankly in my view Japan is going backwards,” warns Ian de Stains, longtime executive-director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan. “If you
look back 10 years, the level of English in service establishments and business was higher than it is today. Young people think they don’t need English or the rest of the world – they’re returning to a very insular view.” European and American companies have long noted the low ability of English speakers in Japan, despite its economic heft and the huge amount of time and money spent on teaching the language. Japanese children learn English in junior high and high school, and many go on to study it in college too. By the time they’re ready for work, millions of young graduates have spent nearly 10 years struggling with the language, but few can do more than mouth a few wobbly phrases. “It’s something I’m always surprised about,” says Suzanna Siebert, a Swiss national who runs a small print graphic design business in western Tokyo. “Even educated Japanese can’t speak [English]. In a university class, there will be only two or three out of 35 students who speak enough English to follow what’s going on.” A major inconvenience for Japanese firms looking to expand abroad, the
Bottom of the class 2009 TOEFL scores (internet-based)
ETS
100
DENMARK
0
CHINA
40
JAPAN
20
99
SINGAPORE
76
96
GERMANY
67
88
INDIA
60
81 SOUTH KOREA
80
90
FRANCE
100
GETTING GOOD BILINGUAL WORKERS IN JAPAN HAS NEVER BEEN EASY – AND DESPITE GOVERNMENT RHETORIC ON THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALISE, MANY SAY IT IS GETTING HARDER dearth of good interlocutors is a minor disaster for foreign firms trying to work here, says the business community. Most find they must work through translators, points out Pascal Gudorf, spokesman for the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. “Negotiating directly or conducting a meeting with a Japanese executive is almost impossible, especially in smaller or mid-sized companies, which we deal with a lot,” he says. “It’s really rare to find a CEO who can speak English.” And a bigger issue is what goes on inside foreign companies that have set up here, says Gudorf, noting that there are about 500 German companies operating in Japan. “The level of frustration of our ex-pats goes up because they can’t find people with English, so they have only a few people in the company they can communicate with. Finding qualified people has always been a problem.” That problem may be worsening. One of the country’s largest foreignlanguage school groups, GEOS, went belly-up this year, even as the industry struggled to recover from the bankruptcy of its biggest player, Nova in 2007. Meanwhile, the 23-year-old Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) – perhaps Japan’s most successful September 2010
21