*to Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Κυνόσαργες

Monday 30 January 2012

Japan, fucking get over it.

You have to learn English, or get left behind by every nation that gets this: S.Korea, China, India...  Doesn't matter if it is 'hard' or 'difficult' or even unfair: English is the de facto international language and is going to be for a couple of generations, no matter what happens to America in the near term.  Just about nobody's going to lean Japanese anymore unless they have family connections... or want to play at making them.

When this many kids don't want to learn English you need to get the birch out and start beating from the Amakudari down to the parents responsible.

More bad news, for Japan.

4 comments:

  1. Japan is doomed..."dooming" itself right now. Iv'e been watching this since I came. When the richest guy in Japan announced mandatory TOEIC scores for his Uniqlo employees it was the youth that bashed him on the net bot the old geezers. That was a sad slap in the face. They can't even see their own ship is sinking.

    China is crushing them and will forever more do so because Japan is clueless. You don't have to like the game....but you better accept the rules (international communication language).

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  2. Yeah, I remember that in the news about Uniqlo and Rakuten, too. Along with news that the willingness of new Japanese hires to work overseas to never be lower. Morons. They might have got away with that attitude in 'The Bubble' when people had to do business on Japanese terms, but that's decades past. Language acquisition requires motivation and creativity. Oh... that's what's wrong here.

    Uniqlo and Muji have a hope if they internationalize, especially replacing head office with non-Japanese staff, before the Japanese ship sinks. Rakuten: not so much.

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  3. Not that I'm disagreeing with your broader point, but the survey this is based on is bullshit. At least without the other subjects for comparison. I'd be willing to bet that if you asked a bunch of 12-15 year-olds about ANY subject at school the majority would make noises about it being important but really confess to hating studying it. Because really, what to fuck do kids that age know about what they'll actually need for the future?

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  4. True that, but it's more fun for me just to dump on Japan, and I'm not wrong on the 'broader point', right? Larger surveys have been done on J-employee attitudes to working abroad, and they've never been worse. Japanese companies (and employees) with any foreign trade are smoking pot if they think they can succeed with that attitude. It ain't like an increasing number of 'Gaijin' are going to learn Japanese, with Japan's economy flailing, demographics in a tailspin, and culture stalled.

    I do not wish it on anyone, but it's an inevitability here: next big quake that hits Kansai or Kanto finishes Japan as a world-player.

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