A Serious Craving to Learn Japanese : Japan’s Emergence as Economic Power Spurs Sales of Language Aids, Executive Enrollment in Courses
No matter how tired or busy he is, business executive Dwane Krumme makes it twice a week to his Japanese class in downtown Los Angeles. From the minute he steps into the 90-minute sessions, he speaks only Japanese with his teacher and classmates.
Meanwhile, Nancy Sasaki rushes across town from California State University, Los Angeles, to Loyola Marymount University to UCLA Extension in Westwood to teach Japanese. She is teaching six courses this term, twice the normal course load for a college language instructor. Next spring, she will begin teaching Japanese to 10 TRW executives in Redondo Beach.
From New York to Akron to Los Angeles, learning Japanese is in vogue.
Sales at Kinokuniya, a bookstore in New York’s Rockefeller Center that specializes in Japanese books, have been rising 30% a year for the past two years. Berlitz International dispatches its instructors to teach Japanese at Firestone Tire & Rubber, the Akron, Ohio, firm now owned by Japan’s Bridgestone Corp. And at the Business Language Institute in Los Angeles, students of Japanese gather on weekdays as early as 6:45 a.m.
This intensifying interest in learning the language reflects the emergence of Japan as a world and economic power. Executives and companies, in particular, are spending thousands of dollars to school themselves in the intricacies, formalities and niceties of business Japanese, which is a far cry from the informal chatter at sushi bars or the simple phrases learned by travelers.
“Everybody is so serious,” said Sanae Ueda, director of the Business Language Institute in Westwood, which specializes in Japanese language instruction. “Students are studying very hard to learn Japanese and about the culture,” added Ueda, who has been teaching the language for 15 years.
The Modern Language Assn. reported that the number of American students enrolled in Japanese classes grew more--45.4% in 1986 (the latest year available) from 1983--than any other language.
“Japanese instruction in the U.S. in the last three years has shown remarkable growth,” said Anthony F. Tedesco, vice president for North America at Berlitz in New York. As recently as 1985, he said, “Japanese didn’t even rank as separate category. When we used to list the top 10 languages, Japanese was not among them. It was lumped in ‘all others.’ ”
Japanese moved into Berlitz’s fourth place last year and is expected to overtake Italian this year as the third most popular language for Americans to learn, he said. Today, Berlitz’ enrollments in Japanese are in the thousands, up sharply from the few hundreds of three years ago. Berlitz teaches the language at most of its 60 facilities in the United States, including those in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Beverly Hills, Woodland Hills, Torrance, Irvine and Orange.
The Business Language Institute, a subsidiary of the Japanese personnel services firm Persona, opened shop in Westwood last April to teach Japanese. Enrollment is up to 250, more than the firm originally anticipated, according to Mitch Lee, sales manager.
Most the students at Berlitz and the Business Language Institute are subsidized by their employers because the private and semiprivate classes are expensive.
At Berlitz, for example, the average course of 66 private lessons, four times a week, costs $2,000. Intensive training courses for eight hours a day, six days a week for five to 12 weeks range from $10,000 to $20,000. At the low end of Berlitz’s scale is a 10-week, small group course that costs $245. A six-month course in one of the Business Language Institute’s classes costs $768.
But many people who want to learn Japanese without paying that much are heading to local college campuses, which have been ill-prepared for the onslaught of students. There are not enough qualified teachers, so many classes have up to 30 students, 10 more than recommended for any language class.
“There is a shortage of teachers,” explained Sasaki, who used to get only two calls a summer from schools seeking her services. “This past summer, I got a call a week. . . . There is a big market out there but not enough places to go learn it.”
As a result, sales of Japanese self-teaching materials--books, audiocassettes and videotapes--are climbing. Prices range from $4.95 for a tiny dictionary to $245 for a three-volume video.
One brisk seller is Webster’s Japanese Dictionary. “Sales have almost doubled this year, compared to last year,” said Phil Friedman, associate publisher of Webster’s New World Dictionaries. Webster’s has sold more than 100,000 copies of the compact $7.95 dictionary since it was introduced in the United States five years ago.
The Tokyo-based book chain Kinokuniya is riding the crest of the boom. It opened three new stores in the United States this year, including one in Newport Beach. It plans another in Costa Mesa. “With most of the stores, the largest customer base is the Japanese people posted here,” explained John R. Fuller, manager of the Newport Beach store. “But the growing areas are the businesses and students interested in Japanese for economic reasons.”
He said the last big surge of interest in things Japanese was in 1980-81 when the television version of James Clavell’s historical novel “Shogun” was aired. “The interest now is more substantial and widespread. . . . As people here see how successful Japanese corporations have been here, they are more interested in finding out more about why and how to deal with it.”
It is not clear just how much Japanese an American business executive needs to know, but even a little helps.
Paul Mizuki, executive vice president at Matrix Financial Corp. in Pasadena, said private classes tailored specifically to help him and his associates introduce their financial services firm to business executives in Japan helped tremendously.
Their teacher “made sure we learned all the proper greetings. . . . We found that it made tremendous difference in the way we were able to explain our company and business to the Japanese. We met with people who didn’t speak that much English in Japan.”
He said their familiarity with Japanese was particularly helpful at dinner. “There was a party of Australians next to our table hosted by some Japanese. We saw a difference. The Japanese looked more comfortable with us, whereas next to us, the host looked nervous and everybody was talking in broken English.”
Krumme began taking Japanese classes in August at his own expense a month after joining his Japanese employer, JCB International Credit Card, where he is general manager and executive vice president. “Clearly, it has added value in my relationship to the Japanese here and abroad. It has shown them a level of seriousness in a working relationship with them that they appreciate.”
He has been to Japan twice since he began his Japanese lessons, which cost him $144 a month. “I was able to introduce myself and express my appreciation to be part of the company,” in Japanese.
“It’s hard work, but it also is invigorating,” he says of the twice-a-week classes. “It is a stimulating experience to sit in a setting--be it a classroom, airplane or office--and to engage in a discussion in the Japanese language. I find that exciting.”
