This blog will be about teaching English in Japan and will provide tips and information as well as teaching materials and ideas.





First of all I will provide a bit of information about teaching in Japan for people who are not familiar with the industry.





During the past 10 or so years, English learning has become a major preoccupation for Japanese people. Japanese has been a compulsory school subject for the total 6 years of Junior High and High School all across Japan for many years, but until recently, few Japanese people could actually speak Japanese. This was because Japanese schools generally teach English using by focusing on studying grammer and translating sentences back and forth between English and Japanese. They did not teach speaking, and although they studied listening, most Japanese people also were not good at understanding spoken English. Over the past 10 or 15 years, English conversation or eikaiwa schools have grown in popularity. These are attended by Japanese people wishing to learn spoken English. Often this is given as a kind of cause and effect by eikaiwa students and the eikaiwa industry. That Japanese schools could not teach spoken English and so students are going to eikaiwa schools to fill in this gap.




The first question I think is why English and why now. Japan is a largely monocultural population now as it has been in the past, and of the small proportion of non-Japanese who are now part of the population, the majority are Asian migrants not from English speaking countries. It is of importance in business of course and as companies become more international and foreign businesses establish branches in Japan or Japanese business overseas it becomes necesarry for employees to share some common language. However, Chinese languages are also important in business but have not experienced a similar boom. I will also make note that Japan went through its economic miracle years in the 80's while remaining largely monolingual although it is true that today's more globalised world is a very different business environment.

Many of the students are not learning English directly for business, many are learning just for travel or fun. English learning is also very fashionable at the moment, it's also seen as making you cool and interesting if you have foreign friends and have been to a lot of countries. Many people talk about these things as a point of pride, like it is an accomplishment. Basically I think it is buying an image, the fact that having even peripheral contact with the Western world brings status shows how high regard the Western world is currently seen in Japan's eyes.