Japan increasingly 'out of sync' with global market as people shun speaking English

Japan is slipping further down the international rankings for spoken proficiency in the English language, with the latest study by a Swiss educational company placing the country behind Malawi and only narrowly ahead of Afghanistan.

That is a poor result for the world's third-largest economy, say experts, and one that arguably puts Japan's role in the world and its agenda at risk.

The annual survey, by Swiss company EF Education First, measures the English proficiency of people in 113 non-English-speaking places around the world. The Netherlands topped the rankings this year, followed by Singapore, Austria, Denmark and Norway.

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After Singapore, the highest-ranked place in Asia was the Philippines, in 20th, followed by Malaysia in 25th, Hong Kong in 29th and South Korea in 49th. China was ranked 82nd.

Japan was listed in the 87th spot, down from 14th position in 2011, the first year the rankings were devised, although only 40 nations were surveyed that year. Japan has fallen in the ranking every year since, continuing that trend in 2023 by sinking another seven places from last year.

That puts Japan one spot behind Malawi and one ahead of Afghanistan, which is followed by Mexico in 89th on the list, with Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar tied in 90th.

"Adult English proficiency has been waning in East Asia for the past four years and in Japan for an entire decade," the EF Education First report noted.

It described Japan's decline in the last 12 months as "significant", and while pandemic-related travel restrictions would have played a role in the figures, "declining English proficiency is likely symptomatic of broader political and demographic shifts".

Eric Fior, the French owner of an English and French language school in Yokohama, said that while rote-learning in Japanese schools gives pupils a good grasp of the written language, young Japanese do not have enough opportunities to speak English.

"There have been efforts to improve English language classes in schools with the introduction of more native-language instructors, but the level is too often very basic and the pupils do not have a chance to really use what they are learning," he told This Week in Asia.

Young Japanese can also be reticent about speaking up if they fear they are going to make a mistake, while fewer have been going abroad to study at tertiary level in recent years, he pointed out.

The government has recognised this as an issue that needs to be rectified, with the education ministry setting a target of 100,000 Japanese going abroad to study a year by 2027. A record 115,146 people studied overseas in the 2018 academic year, but that figure plummeted to 1,487 in 2020, largely due to the pandemic.

"Japan is still, in many ways, quite a contradictory nation, in that it is one of the world's leading economies, it is culturally advanced and is rapidly globalising," said Kyle Cleveland, a professor of Japanese culture at the Tokyo campus of Temple University. "But, at the same time, it fundamentally lags behind many other countries."

Cleveland suggested the Galapagos Effect - a term sometimes used to describe how Japan finds its development to be out of step with the rest of the world - was in play regarding the uptake of English, which remains the global standard for business, diplomacy and other cross-border transactions.

The effect was previously on display in the way in which Japan refused to permit medicines that have been approved in other markets for decades, he said.

Those examples impact the lives and well-being of the Japanese people, he said, but an inability to communicate effectively across borders "is putting the nation at a serious disadvantage", Cleveland said.

"Japan is still quite self-centred and is often unable to effectively and fundamentally alter its priorities, which in turn jeopardises its business practices and its status in the world," he said. "This is stopping it from becoming a more influential and progressive nation, but there is also a link to insularity and a racial aspect of exclusionary practices."

For some, being able to communicate effectively in English is not a priority "for reasons of hubris and arrogance; they do not do it because they do not feel they need to", he said.

Japanese on the world stage are further hampered because their own language is so complicated and therefore relatively few foreigners can use it, which would logically make it even more important for more Japanese to be able to speak English fluently, Cleveland suggested.

"This means there is a fundamental disconnect between Japan and the globalised market, leaving it out of sync with other affluent nations in many different ways," he added. "It is completely self-defeating for Japan not to educate people in English because it means they are not able to compete."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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