Saturday, August 07, 2010

35. WSJ: English Gets The Last Word In Japan

WSJ: English Gets The Last Word In Japan

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI
Every Monday at 8 a.m., nearly 2,000 employees of Rakuten Inc., Japan's biggest online retailer by sales, gather for an asakai, or company meeting, at corporate headquarters along Tokyo's waterfront.
For the past few months the weekly meeting, like much of Rakuten's other in-house business, has been conducted in English, by order of its founder and chief executive. Not only must work documents be written in English, so must the menus in Rakuten's cafeteria and signs in its elevators.
By 2012, Rakuten's employees will be required to speak and correspond with one another in English, and executives have been told they will be fired if they aren't proficient in the language by then.
Rakuten, which has made recent acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe, says the English-only policy is crucial to its goal of becoming a global company. It says it needed a common language to communicate with its new operations, and English, as the chief language of international business, was the obvious choice. It expects the change, among other things, to help it hire and retain talented non-Japanese workers.
Most of the company's largely Japanese-speaking work force of 6,000 appears to be taking the new policy in stride, and many employees support it.
"To be honest, I was a little surprised at first," says Hideki Kamachi, who has worked at the company for about a year, as he studies English vocabulary words to prepare for the Monday morning meeting. "Sometimes I don't understand everything that is being said, but every week I understand more."
The policy was imposed by Rakuten's 45-year-old leader, Hiroshi Mikitani, a banker turned Internet billionaire, who speaks nearly flawless English. "Some people were a little hesitant, but they realized that we were going to do it whether they liked it or not," says Mr. Mikitani, a Harvard Business School graduate who left a prestigious job at the Industrial Bank of Japan to build a Japanese rival to Amazon.com Inc. His company has grown into a sprawling Internet mall with more than 35,000 merchants, an online bank and travel site and net sales of nearly 300 billion yen ($3.5 billion) in 2009.
Rakuten isn't the only Japanese company to have embraced English. It is widely used at some multinationals, including Sony Corp. and Nissan Motor Co., which both have non-Japanese CEOs. Fast Retailing Co., which operates Uniqlo, Japan's largest clothing chain, with stores in New York, London, Paris and Beijing, recently said it plans to hold meetings in English by 2012 if they include non-Japanese participants.
In the mid-1990s Japanese trading house Mitsubishi Corp. considered making English its standard language, but decided it was unnecessary. These days it says it uses English when it makes sense to do so, such as in dealings with foreign customers or its foreign units. Some lesser-known companies, including Nippon Sheet Glass Co. and electronics-components maker Sumida Corp., have used English for years as a common language for documents and meetings.
But few, if any, Japanese companies have gone as far as Rakuten.
The company's move comes as many businesses in Japan are expanding abroad at least partly because their home market, which has been sluggish for years, is expected to shrink as Japan's population declines. The trend has intensified the pressure many Japanese feel to learn English. Most of them have studied the language for six years by the time they graduate from high school, yet relatively few feel comfortable holding a conversation in it.
Partly as a result, Rakuten's so-called English-ization has stirred a frenzy of debate in Japan. On Twitter, blogs and mainstream media, pundits have weighed in on how Japanese schools teach English and whether Japan's language barrier is putting it at a global disadvantage. At a recent news conference, Takanobu Ito, chief executive of auto maker Honda Motor Co., called forcing Japanese workers to speak to one another in English "stupid." Rakuten's CEO has also taken jabs from Japanese nationalists, who say his policy is the first step toward the disappearance of Japanese and, ultimately, the collapse of Japan.
That argument doesn't sway Mr. Mikitani. "Japan is the only country with all these well-educated people who can't speak English," he says. "This is a huge issue for Japan."
Among the 34 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund, Japan had the lowest scores last year on the Test of English as a Foreign Language, a proficiency test given to foreign students who want to study in the U.S. It had the second-lowest score among Asian nations, outperforming only Laos.
Since April, when Rakuten announced its plan to convert to English, 220 employees have signed up for the discounted English conversation class the company offers at night. Others have formed impromptu English study groups after work.
Mr. Mikitani says comfort with English is especially important at Rakuten since its acquisition this year of U.S. online retailer Buy.com for $250 million and French Internet marketplace PriceMinister SA for EUR200 million ($264 million).
The company has compiled a vocabulary list of 5,000 words for its workers to learn, including terms like "monetize" and "functional." While executives will lose their jobs if their English isn't up to snuff by 2012, other workers will be passed over for promotions, Mr. Mikitani says.
The CEO freely admits "resistance doesn't mean anything to me." He presides over a company that has rules about almost everything, down to the number of napkins a worker can take from the company cafeteria -- "two pieces to each," says a sign in stilted English. Another sign in the cafeteria, where employees can get free breakfast and lunch, warns in similarly strained English that rice is limited to one portion: "Sorry another serving is not accepted."
A spokesman for Rakuten says the signs were made by a food-service company it hired, rather than its own employees.
Even the Japanese food options on the menu are listed in English. During a recent lunchtime, workers debated what they might get if they ordered "tofu hamburg steak curry" or "Chinese noodles with pork vegetables in miso-based soup spicy."
One woman paused for a few seconds in front of a sign that read "fried minced meat cutlet." She slowly sounded out the words, "min-ced-o meat-o katsu-retsu," and then stared down at a deep-fried cutlet sitting on top of a plate before moving on.
By contrast, a group of online grammar sticklers has emerged at Rakuten that enjoys correcting Mr. Mikitani's English. "Let's stop discussing about our policy to convert our main language to Eng. We are going to do this to become strong global company," Mr. Mikitani tweeted after his Twitter account was flooded for days with discussion of the company's language policy.
Someone replied in Japanese: "For your reference, one doesn't usually put 'about' after 'discuss.'"
Mr. Mikitani immediately wrote back: "Let's stop being picky."
He revisited the issue four days later, writing: "Well I think many native people use 'discuss about.' At least my friends at Harvard did. How good is your English??"

http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20100807D06NY261.htm