Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success. Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan’s population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049. At the same time Japanese companies are looking outside to grow their businesses. This is good for Japan, except that when you become international, you need to deal in English. Where are these English speakers going to come from?
Prior to the Lehman Shock there were over 80,000 Japanese students travelling abroad to study. After the Lehman shock this number dropped down to 50,000 a year and has crawled back up to around 60,000. Lately, seventy per cent of those studying abroad only stayed for one month, which makes you wonder what they picked up in that short period.
Another worrying thing is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad to study. Over 60% of High School students said they would rather stay in Japan and over 50% of young people in general, said the same thing. So where are the needed English speakers going to come from?
The answer is from inside our companies. Larger companies will send their Japanese staff abroad to work and in the process they improve their international understanding and their language skills. In the past, these returnees have been an alien force for companies, because they come back with a different mindset and the companies haven’t been flexible enough about integrating them into the mother ship. This is getting better and where it hasn’t, these valuable employees jump ship to a better environment, that is to say our firms, where their talents, particularly language ability, can be fully utilised.
The general acceptance of mid-career hires has improved a lot in Japan too and we can all thank the 1999 collapse of Yamaichi securities for that. A lot of loyal, lifetime employees were thrown out on the street and were picked up by other companies, reducing the stigma attached to mid-career hires. The Lehman Shock in 2008, the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and the pandemic since 2020 have all continued this trend of people losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Mid-career hiring has continued to be more accepted as a function of the modern world and this gives all of us better access to English speakers moving companies.
English language lessons are often prevalent inside organisations, as they work to help their staff do better in communicating with the outside world and with staff in Japan from overseas. The problem for some of them though is no amount of English language lessons will convince them to speak up in meetings or to volunteer to present in English. This is where they need additional help.
When forced to present in English, the reflex action is to put all the text up on the screen, so that they can read it to their audience. If that isn’t possible, then they print it all out and read it, word for word, while diligently looking down at the script, ignoring the audience altogether. “Painful” is the main word to describe this experience for those on the receiving end. Why are they destroying their presentations in this way?
The simple answer is perfectionism, driven by fear. This is a country of no defects, no mistakes and no errors. Making a mistake while speaking in English therefore is not possible, the loss of face unimaginable, so all manner of artifices have to be employed to avoid this inadequacy. For the foreigners listening to mistakes made in English by Japanese speakers, this is usually nothing to worry about. We are coming from multi-cultural societies and are used to non-native speakers making pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes. We just mentally rearrange what they said into the correct alignment and answer their questions or make our contribution to whatever they said, without missing a beat. Basically, we are not demanding linguistic purity or perfection – this need is all in the heads of the Japanese when speaking English.
We must help them by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to free them from the chains of grammar, to overlook the butchering of certain words when spoken out loud. We need to encourage them to concentrate on communication and not language.
What I mean by that is putting their passion behind what they say. To speak a little louder than normal, in order to sound more confident, which helps with the credibility of what is being said. To employ pauses to moderate their speaking speed, in case they get nervous and start prattling along. To use the slide as a prompt and speak to the point with the English they have, rather than losing their audience by reading off the screen or script. To try and engage their audience by making eye contact for at least six seconds and to try and make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible during the course of their talk. In this way they can establish the feeling of a personal connection between speaker and listener which is completely independent of language capability. To employ gestures to strengthen the point they are making and not to feel self-conscious about doing so.
We have limited access to those Japanese who have lived abroad and so have to make the most of those we have managed to attract into our companies. Whatever level of English they have has to be worked on beyond English language classes, to enable them to present in a professional manner. If this support is there, then they will become more comfortable dealing with foreign colleagues and speaking in English. They will become fully functioning members of the team and able to work across borders and language barriers.
