“I don’t speak Engrishu.”
Nearly 10 years ago I was asked to serve on the board of directors of TELL, a mental health non-profit serving the international community in Japan. Not long after that, I was asked to step in to run the organization when the Executive Director suffered serious health problems. Through that experience, I came to understand how prevalent mental health issues are, and I achieved greater understanding (than my own personal experience had given me) of the difficulties faced by foreigners (both residents and visitors) in monocultural, monolingual Japan.
It’s pointless to offer services if people don’t know about them, so early in my tenure I decided to solicit support from the Tokyo city government to raise awareness among non-Japanese speakers of our Lifeline service (which provided suicide prevention and crisis handling support). A friend had a contact who was the number two or three official in the government, and after he introduced me, I set up a meeting with the official in charge of “international community relations”. My friend’s contact kindly said she would come along to the meeting, and met me in the lobby of the city hall beforehand.
She was a fluent English speaker (rare in Japan), manifestly smart, and it was confidence-inspiring to meet a government official who seemed so … overtly competent (again, rare in Japan … and perhaps in most governments).
After we exchanged pleasantries, we headed upstairs to meet the Director of International Community Relations, who turned out to be a young woman, perhaps in her early 30s, who did not speak a word of English.
Following introductions, this young woman excused herself for a moment to get her name card, which she had forgotten, and I looked at the senior official who had set up the meeting and said, “No English???” She looked back at me and said, “Mind. Blown.”
Just kidding, she didn’t say that. But in a more professional way, she conveyed the same sentiment.
And that’s Japan.
Where the Director of International Community Relations for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government is a kid who doesn’t speak English. [And whose name card, when I finally got it, did not even have her job title in English!]
In part she had been given the job because Japanese organizations like to rotate personnel through all departments, regardless of (in)aptitude, but also, I have no doubt that most more senior officials were eager to shunt the foreigner-facing job to a junior colleague.
In any event, the meeting proceeded normally (in Japanese, of course), and as far as I can remember, nothing productive came of it (which again, is probably typical of most governments).
Last month, Tokyo conducted disaster preparedness drills aimed at identifying the challenges of communicating with non-Japanese speakers in an emergency. Like the Director of International Community Relations I met, most emergency responders in Japan don’t speak English, or any other foreign language, and with tourism booming (36.9 million travelers visited Japan last year, 5 million more than the previous record, set in 2019), the need for non-Japanese communications is pressing.
Japanese people spend $2 billion a year trying to learn English, with astonishingly poor results. Some of the reasons include over-emphasis on learning grammar, and a socio-cultural risk aversion that makes students reluctant to engage in English-language conversation unless they are confident their efforts will be near-perfect.
The paradox is that although most Japanese are terrible English speakers (over 90 percent cannot speak any English at all), many people aspire to speak the language (which explains the $2 billion they invest every year in lessons).
Learning a foreign language is, of course, hard work for most of us. And memorizing vocabulary lists and grammar rules (especially for a language like English that has so many unfathomable exceptions) is not enough.
Immersion is the best way, but Japan is a homogeneous society in which expectations of behavioral conformity create barriers to intercultural mingling, even while the population of foreign residents has increased by nearly 60 percent (to 3.41 million) over the past 10 years.
When I lived in Japan, my home was in a small fishing and farming village around 75 minutes south of Tokyo. It was a beautiful place, with a view of Mount Fuji, and a population that (like the rest of the country) mostly did not speak English.
One Saturday morning I was watching my son play football (soccer) at the local elementary school ground, and in conversation, another “soccer dad” said to me (in Japanese, of course), “Roberto-san, I really want to learn English.”
I looked at him and said, “Kenji-san, I think what you mean is that you really want to know how to speak English!”
He laughed and said, “Yes, that’s right!”
Another time, I had a meeting in western Tokyo with a guy who ran a small industrial firm, the Japanese branch of a European company. The CEO was a guy in his 40s, I think, and he brought another four or five members of his team into the conference room for our discussion, which was mostly in Japanese, but deviated to English a few times.
After we were done, just before noon, he said to me, “Roberto-san, what are you doing now?”
I told him I was planning to head back to my office to eat some noodles or a sandwich and clear some emails, and he asked if I would like to eat lunch with him and his team.
Very. Unusual.
Japan is not a country in which you ever get an invitation like that, as a foreigner, from a guy you have met an hour previously.
So of course I said yes.
We went to a place near their office, a sort of high-end sushi chain, and three or four of the guys from the meeting came along.
At the restaurant, the conversation switched entirely to English, which the CEO spoke very well.
Prompting my inevitable question, “Where did you learn to speak such good English?”
He laughed and said, “It’s an embarrassing story.”
It seems that as a fresh graduate, he had taken a job with a Japanese company, and quickly been transferred to the Los Angeles office.
He told me, “I was in L.A. for seven years. My customers were Japanese, my colleagues were Japanese, and when I communicated back to HQ in Tokyo, it was in Japanese. In the evenings I would go to an izakaya and drink with my Japanese colleagues or customers, and on the weekends, it was the same, on the golf course or in bars. When the time came for me to transfer back to Tokyo, I spoke no English at all. But of course all my friends figured that after seven years, I was fluent. So mostly to avoid further shame, I signed up for a Berlitz nighttime class, and that’s how I learned English.”
I wrote earlier that almost no Japanese speak English, but that’s not quite true.
For years I have joked to non-Japanese friends traveling to Japan, and to my Japanese friends and acquaintances, that there are four words of English that every Japanese can say:
“I don’t speak Engrishu.”
The foreigners who don’t know Japan mostly are bemused, and some may think I’m being racist.
But all the Japanese laugh. They know.
I don't think you'll find any Japanese who disagree with everything you've written in the article. The CEO's story is very good, a perfect example of the Japanese mentality: he learnt not through immersion in the language, but through the shame of not having learned any English in several years living in the US.