In Japan, as companies internationalize, they are required to“hire linguistically competent employees, and some go even further by designating English as their internal ‘official’ language during working hours”, reports theAsahi Shimbun.
Sharp, a Japanese electronics manufacturer now affiliated with Taiwanese firm Foxconn Technology, announced at the end of June that its employees will be required to converse in English “for all activities related to the company”, depending on the daily.
During a general meeting of shareholders on June 23, 2022, Wu Po-hsuan, chairman of Foxconn Technology, also called Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., said that “English will be designated as the official corporate language within a year. Only after this change can we expand further into overseas markets.”
The president’s goal is to make Sharp more competitive internationally. For this, he plans to increase sales abroad by 15% within a year, particularly in Asia, Europe and the United States. Since taking office in April 2022, he has asked employees to improve their practice of English.
But since this decision is official, “[certains employés] complained, believing that the obligation to exchange exclusively in English made no sense”, emphasizes theAsahi Shimbun. The latter specify that this measure should not be made compulsory for staff members, since they speak Japanese among themselves.
“To know if this obligation will only concern teams that work with foreign countries or if [tous] Japanese employees must communicate in English is always a subject under discussion”, explains a representative of Sharp Corp.
A decade-long upward trend
The same question arose in 2012 at Fast Retailing, which runs the Uniqlo chain of clothing stores. The question was quickly resolved: it has been mandatory for all employees to communicate in English for ten years. “It is sometimes difficult to strictly respect this rule, but now employees really need to communicate in English, and this more than ever, since the number of our stores abroad is increasing”, said a Fast Retailing representative.
E-commerce company Rakuten made the same decision in 2010, and “meetings are in principle exclusively in English”, underlines the Japanese daily. The language level of the employees has also drastically increased since then. While the average score obtained by employees on the Toeic (Test of English for International Communication, which certifies the level of written and spoken English) in 2010 was 526 out of 990 points, it rose to 838 in 2018. The number of foreigners within the company has also increased. They now represent 20% of the workforce, according to theAsahi Shimbun, and occasions when only Japanese are present are becoming rarer, according to a Rakuten representative.
Without systematically becoming the official language of companies, English is more and more often imposed when Japanese companies look abroad.
This was the case for Nissan or Takeda Pharmaceutical, for example, for which English has become a language of exchange adapted to situations involving foreign players, without for all that obliging the employees to exchange in English if all the parties concerned are comfortable with Japanese. “English is used rationally, depending on the situation”, said a representative of Nissan, and has been since 1999, when the company entered into an alliance with Renault. At Takeda Pharmaceutical, the change took place when Christophe Weber was appointed as its head in 2014, the company’s first foreign president. Of the company’s 18 executives, 13 are from overseas, so board meetings are held in English, but Japanese is still used in domestic offices.
“The reality of globalization increasingly compels the Japanese business community to hire language-savvy employees in a clear manner.”