Why do EU companies struggle to find good English-speaking staff?
It is one way to concentrate minds. Japan’s largest online retailer, Rakuten, has told its employees that they must be fluent in English by 2012.
Executives who aren’t up to speed by then will be sacked; rank-and-file workers will find their path to promotion blocked.
That tough directive is not the first. Fast-expanding retailer Uniqlo is one of a handful of Japanese companies that have recently made English their internal lingua franca. Sony and Nissan have used it for years. But Rakuten’s initiative by its Harvard-educated founder Hiroshi Mikitani may be the clearest sign yet that Japanese corporations are accepting a long-held truism: for better or worse, English is the language of global business.
Unfortunately, the realisation may be too late. Getting good bilingual workers in Japan has never been easy and, despite government rhetoric on the need to internationalise, many say it is getting harder.
“Frankly in my view Japan is going backwards,” warns Ian de Stains, long-time executive-director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan. “If you look back 10 years, the level of English in service establishments and business was higher than it is today. Young people think they don’t need English or the rest of the world – they’re returning to a very insular view.”
European and American companies have long noted the low ability of English speakers in Japan, despite its economic heft and the huge amount of time and money spent on teaching the language.
Japanese children learn English in junior high and high school, and many go on to study it in college too. By the time they’re ready for work, millions of young graduates have spent nearly 10 years struggling with the language, but few can do more than mouth a few wobbly phrases.
“It’s something I’m always surprised about,” says Suzanna Siebert, a Swiss national who runs a small print graphic design business in western Tokyo. “Even educated Japanese can’t speak [English]. In a university class, there will be only two or three out of 35 students who speak enough English to follow what’s going on.”
A major inconvenience for Japanese firms looking to expand abroad, the dearth of good interlocutors is a minor disaster for foreign firms trying to work here, says the business community.
Most find they must work through translators, points out Pascal Gudorf, spokesman for the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Japan. “Negotiating directly or conducting a meeting with a Japanese executive is almost impossible, especially in smaller or mid-sized companies, which we deal with a lot,” he says. “It’s really rare to find a CEO who can speak English.”
And a bigger issue is what goes on inside foreign companies that have set up here, says Gudorf, noting that there are about 500 German companies operating in Japan. “The level of frustration of our ex-pats goes up because they can’t find people with English, so they have only a few people in the company they can communicate with. Finding qualified people has always been a problem.”
That problem may be worsening. One of the country’s largest foreign-language school groups, GEOS, went belly-up this year, even as the industry struggled to recover from the bankruptcy of its biggest player, Nova in 2007. Meanwhile, the 23-year-old Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) – perhaps Japan’s most successful attempt to shrug off its traditional cultural isolationism and engage with the world – is being targeted for cutbacks and possible termination.
Under pressure from DPJ lawmakers looking to trim government fat, JET’s overseer, the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, this year trimmed 15% from its budget. Most expect that to shrink further.
Observers are divided on the impact of these developments. Few professionals rated what went on in Nova or GEOS classrooms. And in a globalised world where language learning materials are available at the click of a mouse, the JET programme has outlived its usefulness, say some critics.
Speciality or extra skill?
The bigger problem here in any case has not been finding good English speakers, but those with good secondary skills, argues Bert Winderickx, general manager of the Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce in Japan. “It’s not so much the lack of English that is the problem – though that’s an issue – as a lack of English speakers in the relevant sector. English is seen as a speciality, not as simply a tool in the management toolbox.”
Owen Devitt of Enterprise Ireland in Tokyo agrees: “Although companies complain that they cannot find English-speaking staff, it may be more accurate to say that they cannot find English-speaking staff with business knowledge. Very often, Japanese overseas students will study humanities rather than business.”
For smaller foreign firms that is an especially acute problem, notes Englishman Simon Godden, co-founder of Tokyo-based Ad Networks, an online advertising agency. “The specialist speakers want to work for bigger firms like Sony. They’d find it humiliating to work for someone like us.”
But whatever their faults, the JET programme and those big chains were one indication of Japan’s passion for learning languages. Today’s cooling interest is in sharp contrast to the country’s Asian competitors. South Koreans have responded to the global downturn by spending more on education than ever – nearly $30bn in 2008, according to The Bank of Korea – much of it on private English-language learning. China sends five million students to university every year, all of whom must study English. “If you go to Seoul or Shanghai, there’s more readiness and openness to speak there,” points out de Stains. “It’s almost like the Japan of 30 years ago.”
The big danger is that Japan will lose touch and “fail to compete globally,” he says, recalling what he calls the “farce” of the “Yokoso! Japan” tourist campaign as an example of its lingering insularity. “They chose a word that doesn’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t speak Japanese. Compare that to [other tourist marketing campaigns such as] “Incredible India” or “Truly Asia”.
The cost to Japan could be high, he warns, citing the recent case of a “major” UK-Japanese joint venture that suddenly collapsed. “It completely fell apart because they failed to understand each other, and it’s difficult to avoid concluding that part of the reason was linguistic. On UK trade missions, there’s a real divide between those who are positive about business here and those who have not been able to make a real connection because of their interlocutors.”
Counterview — “Learn Japanese”
But not everyone agrees that English ability is the problem. Foreign executives should learn Japanese if they want to do business here, argues Graham Harris of the Harris Consultancy.
“I think that the Japanese would see complaints about English-speaking ability as more griping by foreign companies to cover up the fact that they are not doing well in Japan.
The answer is surely for more foreigners to learn Japanese. I have a hard time seeing Japanese bankers in London complaining that life is tough for them because not many Brits speak Japanese.
The need for Japanese working for foreign companies in Japan to speak English is exaggerated. Many of them rightly spend 95% of their day speaking to Japanese people, i.e., colleagues and customers. The other 5% of their day is spent speaking to their foreign boss who is too lazy to learn Japanese.
Foreign companies often ask head hunters to find them English-speaking executives when, in fact, they do not really need them. When they really work out how much English is actually required, then the pool of talent goes up tenfold.
Sometimes the head of the Japanese operation is Japanese. Head office staff should have more patience when speaking to him, rather than that Japanese executive going on an English course.”
Graham Harris has advised foreign companies on Japanese market entry for over 10 years and lectures on the subject at Keio University.