Category: Japan

Things Japanese, including thngs that will not spark joy in the hearts of Japanophiles, many of whom harbor some misconceptions about the country and culture they adore.

Entitlement and Linguistic Imperialism of Foreigners Wanting to Come to Japan

My recent participation on LinkedIn provided me a glimpse into how some foreigners—particularly foreigners who are having language-related employment problems in Japan or who want to come here to work but haven’t yet made it—view Japan and its “language problem.”

A complaint I often hear is that it is unfair for Japanese companies to require foreign employees to be Japanese capable. Some foreigners cite the requirement to pass a Japanese language proficiency test as being discriminatory. After all, they are highly educated, speak English, and have extremely valuable technical skills that don’t require Japanese ability, right?

I am not talking about farm or factory workers brokered into Japan from Asia, but rather people seeking work in jobs that call for a high level of education and skill; jobs such as programmer, but physically in a Japanese company, not on a farm in Tochigi or a factory in Aichi.

To my ears, the above type of comment is evidence of both entitlement and linguistic imperialism.

Where did these people get the notion that Japanese companies are obligated to treat them any differently from other employees?

I have spent a few years in Japan (about 50, actually), have had professional interaction with hundreds of companies, and have yet to encounter a Japanese company that operates in English here, or that would consider a foreign employee in Japan incapable of communicating in Japanese to be a full member of their team.

Surprise! The language of Japan is Japanese, and almost everybody here, including me, thinks that’s just fine.

The people voicing displeasure at the language requirement would, as employees, be required to interact on a daily basis with Japanese employees, most of whom are not proficient in English, and that needs to be done in Japanese. Interacting with other employees is part of the job. Without Japanese, a foreigner will not be fully functional.

These disgruntled foreigners need to remember that Japanese companies are made not of computer programs, databases, and hardware, but of carbon-based humans who communicate in Japanese. I suppose an argument could be made that the foreigners could work remotely, but then they don’t need to be in Japan, and that would burst the come-to-Japan balloon that many of these people are floating.

Why don’t Japanese speak English, some might wonder? Well, the short answer is that they don’t need to.

Additionally, although Japan never succeeded at conquering enough countries for long enough to force their language down the throats of many non-Japanese in a lasting manner, the situation with English is quite different. The success of anglophone incursions into countries and linguistic lives all over the globe has fostered a cohort of native English speakers who think that English is a given.

Maybe they think that having to learn Japanese places them at an unfair disadvantage with respect to native Japanese speakers. Fair or not, they are correct about the disadvantage and just need to suck it up.

Some March 11th Memories

It was March 11, 2011, and I had interpreted for about two hours for a client located near Tameikesanno Station. The meeting with their overseas attorneys lasted for about two hours, and the attorneys were going to be left alone in the meeting room for a while after I departed. I imagine they might have had dinner with our shared client in store for them after I left, but what was to happen in just a few minutes would probably interfere with those plans, and I heard later it made them swear that they would not come back to Japan for quite some time. I heard that the quake hit while there were none of their hosts around to assure them that they were not going to meet their end during their trip to Japan.

Meanwhile, I headed toward the Metro station, reached the platform several floors below ground level, and was waiting for my train.

It was around 2:45 pm, and the tremor that hit was undeniable and frightening, but nobody on the platform could imagine the much greater tragedy unfolding hundreds of kilometers to the north of us.

The platform, of course, shook wildly. The ceiling above the tracks and platform looked like a flimsy dropped ceiling resting on a flimsy matrix-like support, which probably served to hide pipes and cabling. I thought parts of it would come down with all the shaking. One waiting passenger hugged a thick pillar standing in the middle of the platform; others ran for the stairs.

I kept sitting still and looked at my Blackberry (it was 2011, you see), only to see an email reporting that a cement wall near the sender somewhere in the West end of the city had collapsed. A fellow peeking at my display was rather distressed to see this. About 20 minutes after the shaking subsided, no train had arrived, and a voice came over the PA system: “We’re terribly sorry to cause you inconvenience. Train service will be starting again shortly, so please wait a bit longer.” I wondered whether the person making the announcement believed that, or was just reading from a prepared text to be used in the event of an earthquake.

The announcement turned out to be quite optimistic. No train was going to arrive, not shortly, and not until the next morning.

After hearing a more-realistic announcement that we should make our way up the stairs to the ground level, we all obediently made our way outside, up what seemed like more flights of stairs than we had descended.

Upon reaching ground level outside, there were numerous people in normal business attire but wearing white helmets who were urging people to “walk this way.” If they had done that in English, I would have been tempted to take them up on their straight line, but my concern over what had happened and just where it had happened stifled my desire for comedy relief, and nobody would have gotten the joke or movie reference anyway.

So what now? Silly me, I thought I could walk to the ANA Hotel to wait for a taxi to go to some station where a train would be operation. It was immediately apparent that things were more seriously disrupted than I had imagined. From the hotel taxi stand, I could see an elevated road with cars stopped bumper-to-bumper, and the sidewalks of the roads beneath that and running past the hotel were filled with people walking in the direction of Shibuya, although who knows where these people were headed. Home, I imagined.

After a wait of about an hour, it was apparent that there were going to be no taxis swerving into the hotel taxi stand to pick people up. I was getting hungry and decided to walk to Devan des PTT, an okonomiyaki place I had been going to for at least three decades. Upon arriving—it was already about 5:30pm—there were already other quake refugees sitting at the counter. Some had been staying at a nearby hotel that couldn’t serve meals because of the gas supply being cut off.

After enjoying the usual good okonomiyaki served up by the owner, Onyama-san, I headed back to the ANA Hotel, again hoping that things had settled down to the point at which taxis would be picking people up at the taxi stand. No such luck. Several other refugees and I gave up and entered the hotel from the taxi stand. Not surprisingly, there were no rooms available, but I had not intended to get a room, anyway.

I pulled together three or four smallish chairs in one corner of the lobby, unfortunately in a location in which a cold wind would strike me for about 15 seconds each time someone exiting or entering caused the nearby automatic doors to open. That happened about every two minutes, but I managed to fall asleep. I awoke around 2am to find that someone had put a blanket over me, two actually. I don’t think this would have happened in a US hotel.

I slept surprisingly well, and felt so thankful that that I popped for a horribly expensive hotel breakfast for 3000-plus yen. It was worth it. The tables around me were occupied by people in diverse predicaments caused by the earthquake. There were people on business trips to Tokyo, including one from the affected area. Then there was a mother and daughter, in Tokyo for a school entrance exam. Would the exam be delayed? they wondered.

My mobile service was limited, but good enough to learn how tragically things had unfolded to the north of Tokyo.

And here we are, 14 years later, just after a wide-ranging forest fire hit one of the same areas struck by the tsunami that followed the earthquake. That forest fire would be called a wildfire in the US—and was called that in some English reportage of the fire—for sociopolitical reasons that some in Japan would probably claim don’t apply.

Japan is a resilient country with a resilient people living in it. This becomes clear every time a natural disaster occurs, although part of the aftermath of 3-11 earthquake was arguably made worse by lack of forethought by the bureaucrats and their friends running the Fukushima nuclear power plant that experienced a meltdown, a distressing term we tend not to use here in Japan. But I digress.