Foreign Language Instruction in Japan

The English Language Market

As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the public school system in Japan is designed to teach a kind of bones-only, skeletal English lacking in most of the magic that makes learning any language, be it one's mother tongue or someone else's, a worthwhile social and personal intellectual endeavor. Certainly those Japanese parents who are aware of the magic of their own language sense that something dreadfully important is missing in their child's foreign language training. Indeed, next to the origin, meaning, and proper use of Sino-Japanese characters, English is probably the most talked about linguistic topic in Japan. Notwithstanding, speaking a foreign language and talking about it in one's native tongue are not the same.

It is not only the parents of Japanese children who perceive this gap; however, it is also Japanese businesses that must operate in overseas markets and deal with foreign merchants, bankers and industrialists in Japan. Together these groups have created a Japanese market for foreign language training worth hundreds of billions of Japanese yen. If you are in doubt about the size of this market, just board a train in either Tôkyô or Yokohama, get off at any station, large or small, and look for the advertisements for foreign language schools that you inevitably find both in the train car that you took to get to the station and in the station itself. So big is this industry that one of the larger language companies recently listed on the Tôkyô Stock Exchange. If at the station you cannot find an advertisement for a branch office of a large company, then surely you will find an advertisement for one or several smaller local schools. Most of these latter are run by Japanese, but some are owned and managed by foreign residents, as well.

Much of the instruction at privately owned schools is performed by native speakers who were born and raised outside of Japan -- ­ many of whom who can barely speak a word of Japanese. Much of the private instruction is also undertaken by Japanese returnees with overseas language education, who spend much of their students' time explaining in Japanese about the language they are trying to teach.

With regard to English language instruction there are schools for Canadian English, Australian English, USAmerican English and British English. A USAmerican English school may offer Japanese residents an opportunity to learn from an African-American, whose great grand parents were brought to the United States to work as slaves on a plantation in USAmerica's prewar South. A school specializing in Australian English may host a biingual Indian from Southern Asia, so as to better reflect the racial and ethnic diversity that characterizes modern Australian society and thus better prepare its students for what they are likely to encounter in their first overseas visit to Australia. Accordingly, like many foreign things one finds in Japan the owners of these schools have done their best to recreate in Japan the world outside of Japan, so that Japanese can partake in it without ever having to leave the sanctity of all things Japanese.

This latter is usually achieved by dividing the staff of these schools into two parts: a Japanese administrative staff to handle matters of payment, teacher selection, student complaints, and anything else having to do with owning and operating a business in Japan; and an instructional staff to perform the actual teaching. These latter often consist of instructors who are unable to speak any Japanese, or just enough, so as to appear funny to their students and thus make these latter feel better with regard to their own inadequacy in their teacher's native tongue.

Those instructors who are able to speak Japanese, or want to learn Japanese, are often forbidden to speak Japanese in the classroom, even when their students could sometimes learn more by comparing their native language with the target language of a well-practiced bilingual instructor. Needless to say, the line is once again clearly drawn between Japanese and foreigners, and cross-communication between them is strictly limited. Thus, what Japanese students have been told all along in the public school system -- that the vast majority of foreigners are either unable or incapable of learning Japanese -- is perpetuated in the private sector as well. In short, Japanese and foreigners are exploited by other Japanese to overcome an internal barrier that could be better brought down, if Japanese would only speak Japanese with their foreign guests.