Japan Panel Seeks English Dialogue

What does Japan need to do to reverse the economic stagnation, political apathy and social ennui of the past decade?

Throw open its stifling, conformist system and teach the Japanese to speak and read English, or they will be marginalized in the emerging global society, concludes a report to Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi that has generated increasing debate and headlines in recent weeks.

The blue-ribbon report calls for a national discussion on making English this nation’s second official language.

Like many of the report’s recommendations--which include lowering the voting age from 20 to 18, loosening immigration laws, encouraging individual initiative, restricting the role of bureaucrats and empowering citizens--it is unclear whether this call to global literacy will budge Japan’s hidebound government.

But it comes as pundits, educators and businesspeople here are fretting over Japan’s notoriously poor command of English. Failure to achieve fluency in the like-it-or-not indispensable language of technology, finance and the Information Age is seen as a growing competitive handicap.

“There are several areas in which Japan deserves to be labeled a failure, but it is in English--the lingua franca of today’s world--that Japan has flunked the most conspicuously,” wrote Tokyo University professor Takashi Inoguchi.

Without a solid grasp of English, Inoguchi argued, Japanese people “will be unable to quickly digest the latest technological advances around the world and also to swiftly and effectively transmit news of their own advances. They will, in short, fall further behind in every way.”

Whatever the government decides to do, the private sector is jumping into gear. Japanese media reports this week say that companies are linking bonuses and promotion to English-language performance.

Experts insist that the Japanese are no worse than anyone else at learning another language. They say the problem is that English education begins a decade too late here--in middle school--and with teachers who can’t speak the language well. And few English-speaking Americans master a second language.

Still, the Japanese have a national inferiority complex about English.

Despite the linguistic distance between Japanese and English, and the well-known shortcomings of Japan’s rote-and-grammar method of teaching another language, Japanese people continue to berate themselves in news reports, television comedies and advertisements as a nation of linguistic dunces. Yet foreigners who can manage a single sentence in atrociously accented Japanese are congratulated and flattered as though they were geniuses.

Exhibit A in self-flagellation is the prominence given to the abysmal scores of Japanese students on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), the most widely used international proficiency test for academia.

A 1996 government white paper noted that, while Japan’s gross domestic product was second in the world, its students ranked 180th in English proficiency as measured by TOEFL.

TOEFL scores last year were only slightly better, with Japan still lagging China, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, although it spends far more on education. Even students from Myanmar, Pakistan, Thailand, Nepal and hermetic North Korea scored higher, noted front-page newspaper stories.

Critics say the statistics are skewed by the fact that more than 100,000 Japanese students take the TOEFL exam each year, whereas in many smaller countries only a few hundred or thousand of the academic elite bother to take it. In North Korea, for example, only 336 people sat for the exam, though they scored an average of 510, compared with 501 for the Japanese. A perfect score is 677.

“I take some contention with the notion that Japanese students are notoriously poor language learners,” said Sean Reedy, professor of English and linguistics at the Maebashi Institute of Technology in Gumma. “Many students who shouldn’t be taking the TOEFL are taking it.”

But many Japanese businesses, recognizing that English proficiency is as vital as computer, accounting or technical skills in an international economy, are demanding that prospective employees take standardized English tests.

Until recent years, speaking English too well could be a disadvantage here. Those who spent long periods overseas, even graduates from top foreign universities, often faced discrimination upon returning home to this hyper-conformist society--especially if their Japanese was rusty, they made mistakes writing ideographs or had acquired jarringly direct foreign manners.

Today, the tables have turned. Plenty of successful Western companies, and an increasing number of Japanese start-ups, view returnees as an asset, said Garry Evans, a strategist with HSBC Securities in Tokyo.

Most Japanese companies and ministries still have a small handful of urbane English or French speakers who are dragged out to deal with foreigners. Savvy gaijin refer to these people as “barbarian handlers” and realize that they usually are not the real decision makers in their organizations.

Lack of English ability in senior management remains a serious problem, Evans said.

“If you take a group of investors around to see Japan DoCoMo [the highest-valued company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange], as likely as not the presentation will be in Japanese, and you’ll have to provide an interpreter,” Evans said. “In investor relations, it is undoubtedly a handicap. The number of managers in Japan who can pick up the Harvard Business Review in English and read it is rather small.”

The report to Obuchi, titled “The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium,” was released in January. It calls for organizing English classes according to level of achievement, improving the objective assessment and training of English teachers and expanding the number of foreign teachers of English.

This is seen as political anathema to the educational establishment, which does not allow foreigners to receive Japanese teaching certification, and to Japan’s 300,000 English teachers. It is widely believed here that most teachers would flunk tests in oral English, but there is no evidence since teachers are not required to take TOEFL or other standardized tests.

Most sweeping of all, the report sets the goal that all Japanese citizens acquire a working knowledge of English by adulthood.

To achieve that goal, English-language education should start in kindergarten--or better yet, in nursery school, linguist Reedy said.

Conservatives, however, have always vetoed such proposals, which they see as displacing the primacy of Japanese-language education.

“It has very little to do with linguistics but rather their fear that Japanese cultural sovereignty will be lost if English is introduced at an earlier age,” Reedy said.

It is symbolic of how slowly Japan moves that, after years of debate, the Ministry of Education has finally decided to allow English to be taught in public elementary schools--but not until 2002.