Talk like a gaijin

ITS buses and trains arrive on the dot. Its engineers are famously precise. But when it comes to English, Japan is uncharacteristically sloppy. Signs are often misspelled. Taxi drivers point at phrasebooks to communicate with foreigners. Shops that take an English name to be trendy often get it horribly wrong: witness “Poopdick”, a second-hand cosmetics outlet.

English-speakers are much less common in Japan than in most rich, globalised countries. In 2015 Japan’s average score in the TOEFL, a popular test of proficiency for non-native speakers, was 71 out of 120, lower than in all East Asian countries except Laos and Cambodia. Companies seeking English-speakers tend to look for people who studied or grew up abroad, on the assumption that locally schooled candidates will not cut the mustard.

The government wants to change this. Earlier this month it announced plans to overhaul the teaching of English. Children may soon start learning the language two years earlier, when they are eight instead of ten. Lessons will emphasise communication over reading, writing and grammar.

All this, it is hoped, will help Japan play a bigger role in a world where English is the lingua franca. “We need English to understand other cultures and explain ourselves to them,” says Hideyuki Takashima of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. And, particularly important to the government of Shinzo Abe, English is needed to boost the economy. Japanese companies, which are increasingly expanding abroad as the local population shrinks and ages, need English to prosper outside, and to attract talented workers to Japan.

Some businesses have taken matters into their own hands. Sony has long insisted that workers be able to explain the workings of its products in English. Six years ago Hiroshi Mikitani, the Harvard-educated boss of Rakuten, an e-commerce giant with operations in 30 countries, decreed that English should become the firm’s main language; it no longer conducts any meetings in Japanese. Rakuten provides tuition in English for all its staff. Honda, a carmaker, said last year that by 2020 it too will make the linguistic shift.

Tweaks to the education system alone will not be enough; cultural barriers abound. Many Japanese don’t see the need to use English because they rarely travel abroad and work in jobs that don’t require it. American films and music are not as widespread as in Europe, Africa or the Middle East. Traditionalists, eager to maintain the purity of Japanese culture, would be happy for things to stay that way.

Kensaku Yoshida, a professor at Sophia University in Tokyo, reckons the biggest obstacle is a lack of confidence. Many Japanese are so embarrassed by the inevitable mistakes that a non-native speaker makes that they prefer not to try at all. Many also struggle with English sounds: their language does not differentiate between “l” and “r”, for instance. The many English words used in Japanese are often so changed as to be unrecognisable to a native speaker: aidoru (idol), Makudonarudo (McDonalds), bareboru (volleyball). “We need to accept that we don’t have to talk like native speakers,” says Mr Yoshida. “We just have to communicate.”