As someone who absolutely loves any and every attempt to use my mediocre Japanese skills, all I can say is もったいない[0]!
...that being said, this is also kind of inevitable. Masahiro Sakurai[1] talked about this in a video, about how he has to remind Japanese developers to name all their files and functions in English. Just in case they need to bring on foreign contractors. Japanese programmers are already slinging around a lot of English relative to the average resident of Tokyo, even if it's all wasei-eigo[2].
[0] What a waste!
[1] Designer of Kirby and Smash Bros. Now runs a YouTube channel on game development, which has an English version translated by 8-1.
Yes that is the same people that translated UNDERTALE into Japanese and yes it's because Toby Fox recommended them.
[2] Made-in-Japan English. Japanese is like 10-20% English by volume, so sometimes they'll just make up new English words. Sometimes they even get loanworded back into English!
I wonder if people will find this massive superstrate of English words in all languages in the far future and wonder what kind of civilization existed that it extended its influence so far.
Yes, in fact several English spelling changes were done specifically with the idea of "correcting" words that were thought to be Latin loanwords. e.g. the 'b' in "debt" got stuck there because it made it look more like the Latin "debitum". That word has no Latin etymology nor has it ever has a 'b' sound in it, of course.
I heard anecdotaly from someone who worked at Rakuten that the shift to English caused issues in meetings, not because of language problems but because English doesn't designate social structure like Japanese.
In Japanese, you conjugate verbs differently depending on if the person is more or less senior than you, as well as other language changes. Apparently when they switched to English it caused people to take offense that lower people were being rude. Also, people also struggled to identify who was at what level, something that is super easy listening in to a Japanese conversation.
Not sure how involved the person I heard this from was, but it makes a good story!
Not a Japanese company, but similar. I started my career working for a Korean conglomerate. Korean has similar honorifics as Japanese, as well an obsession for titles (even more so than Japan a I would say).
When I, as a Korean American, got promoted into a managerial role with direct reports, I tried to foster a more casual working environment and told my new minions they could call me by name. My manager chewed me out for that - my reports were to always refer to me as Team Leader John, not John (not my real name).
I quit that job, and got into my first Western (British) company. I ask how I should be addressing my managers and superiors, and the answer is “oh just call them by their first name, whether it’s your line manager or the CEO”. Culture shock.
American science and technology development is unique in its flatness.
Post World War II and Manhattan project, the culture learned that hierarchy creates an energy barrier for information transfer.
It was interesting for me working with professors at the bench in The United States. When I was studying in Germany, professors seemed more aloof/ivory tower-ish, at least where I was in east Germany MOF 2000s.
I would be curious how non-Japanese are coping with this situation. While the workplace might be in English, I would think the rest of the worker's world is in Japanese... Do they have a non-Japanese ghetto where people can find housing and shopping? Are they offering Conversational Japanese courses to the foreign workers, or even providing them with help getting settled and a guide?
We visited Japan in the mid-00's and outside of Kyoto found a real shortage of latin-lettered signage. Our train and hotels were set up by a friend so we didn't have to deal with that and fortunately there were readable letters with the train and an appreciation of my business cards when checking in. Otherwise, there was a lot of pointing and Indian food involved. Have things changed since then?
Edit: When we were there our GSM phones did not work in Japan - we needed to have a rental. Has the spread of iPhones meant that non-native phones can work in Japan?
There are plenty of people who live in Tokyo who speak ~no Japanese, despite being here for 20+ years. Not recommended from a social sanity perspective, but there are enough foreigners to where you can just exist in the non-JP bubble for ~ever. Especially in the fancier parts of town.
And even absent that you can just figure out and manage. It's not the Netherlands but you can be functionally illiterate and exist here
There are plenty of Japanese classes in Japan. There are formal language schools, things offered by the city, and you can also just pay for private lessons. But if you're coming for work you're probably busy with work
Having said all that... loads of companies do the whole "English is the official language" thing here but are still properly segmented into "can speak Japanese" and "cannot speak Japanese" cliques. It's not the end of the world but I would say the workplace is where the questions are the biggest for me
We went with armed with Google Maps, Google Translate, and a cellular router you rent at the airport (or just use Google Fi's free international data). Never had an issue. That was several trips from 2014 ish onwards.
Every train route is on Google Maps, restaurant menus are easy to scan with Translate, there are English signs everywhere, many touristy places speak English anyway, the locals are super friendly and helpful, etc.
It's a major international destination, not some backwater island...
If you decide to move to another country you might as well decide to learn the basics of the language - mind you, knowing how to count/read basic signs/ask for food gets you a long way. You can learn this in weeks/months almost anywhere. On the other hand, it would take much longer to get to the level of fluency required to communicate successfully in the workplace. I see this article in this way, English at work and some other language outside, which is not uncommon elsewhere in the world.
Yes, they do. It's called Shibuya / Shinjuku, lol
I'd say if you have a partner who's Japanese, and you're lazy af, you don't need to learn the language. Most foreigners I've met in Tokyo stick to their groups as well and usually end up complaining about Japan and the bureaucracy (mostly because they can't read or write to save their lives).
> Have things changed since then?
I think the biggest change is the Japanese opting to use more ひらがな（hiragana）/ カタカナ (katakana) in the news, signs, and every day messages (subtitles / ふりがな [furigana]). This is highly welcomed in my opinion. I think it's the right way to teach all people how to read.
I must say though, companies like HENNGE is quite special, and I root for more companies that try to welcome changes.
Although there are only a handful of foreigners in my current employment (including myself), we try to slowly include English in our stand-ups / other small-informal meetings.
> We visited Japan in the mid-00's and outside of Kyoto found a real shortage of latin-lettered signage.
I heard the same from my in-laws around then, but we've been a bunch of times over the last decade, most recently immediately post-quarantine-- Hiroshima, Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and Tokyo.
I'd attest that across these cities, they really stepped up signage in preparation for visitors to the Olympics. I barely had to think to translate anything on the last trip; everyone had English menus, QR codes to English versions of such, and English signs everywhere tourists were expected (arcades, stores, restaurants).
We had kids in tow so weren't crawling locals bars, love hotels or pachinko parlors. Those may still be tricky to navigate.
I won't say it's trivial but smartphones, GPS, Google Translate, etc. have made things much easier since I first traveled to Japan maybe 15 years ago. Yes, iPhones work. And, while things are harder when you get more rural, traveling is pretty straightforward at least between and in cities.
Just FYI to those reading and planning a trip: you can SIM swap many makes and models of phones but you need to check if they support the right bands. You're safe with iPhones. Many NA pixels won't work but my NA Pixel 6a does. You just have to do some reading.
Many NA phones might not work if they're not "unlocked", and can only use SIM cards from the carrier. Many prepaid phones are like this too, and can only be used with that prepaid plan.
Verizon phones should work fine though, though the CDMA part won't work abroad obviously, but the other bands it uses should be enough. Verizon phones are all unlocked. Others you might need to get unlocked by the carrier before you go.
Also, the very latest iPhones don't use SIM cards, but rather eSIMs. I'm not sure if that'll work with a tourist-oriented phone service (I doubt it).
I would say 95-99% of transportation signage have English translations. There's still the remaining few percent where it's entirely in Japanese (source: visited the Kansai region a few months ago). They're usually signs on the ground on whether a line is express or non-express.
I ended up on a random bus in Sapporo once and it was the only public transportation without English signage or announcements in multiple trips to Japan using multiple public transportation systems.
a quick view on YouTube of a current travel video in 札幌 Sapporo, Hokkaido region, showed the transit machine, and one of the choices was English, also Simplified Chinese. The signage at the entrance to the station had a line of English name on it.
You can get by in Tokyo without knowing much Japanese, but the real joy of traveling to Japan is experiencing the culture and you can do that best by learning the language. It isn't easy though and that can be off putting, but learn a few of the useful phrases like " how much is it" and go from there. It's well worth visiting especially with the yen so weak.
The yen value hurts the most on lodging and shopping when it's high. Museums, temples and other cultural experiences are mostly cheap or free. Dining is generally affordable if you're not a broke backpacker.
In language, Japanese has a lot of gotchas that can mean the opposite of what you meant to say, and cause offense where a compliment was intended. One easy failure is the difference between cute (kawaii) and ugly/scary (kuwaii)...polarization hinges on a single mumbled syllable ("kuh-waii" yields mixed reactions). So make sure you speak clearly and with enunciated confidence, like you're a Real Housewife from New Jersey. If you want to say "cute," the key is in the "kah" ;)
I hate to be that guy but it’s kawaii vs kowai, the latter having one less syllable (at the end). Something like the difference between pool and pal. There’s also no “uh” sound (although I see what you are going for), and “u” is pronounced as in “you”.
I’m not trying to correct you just for the sake of it. Fortunately, all of this is pretty easy to be clear if you learn katakana, it’s pronunciation and romaji for several loan words. Using on-the-fly pronunciation guides like “uh” will trip you up.
> The yen value hurts the most on lodging and shopping when it's high. Museums, temples and other cultural experiences are mostly cheap or free. Dining is generally affordable if you're not a broke backpacker.
Pretty much everything is affordable at the current exchange rate if you're already able to get a round trip flight over here.
> One easy failure is the difference between cute (kawaii) and ugly/scary (kuwaii).
But even if you mispronounce, people will understand what you meant to say just based on the context. They won't think you're saying their dog or baby is "scary" instead of "cute".
Also, it would be quite hard to cause offense to most Japanese people if you're attempting to speak their language. I wouldn't go into any conversations with that anxiety in the back of your mind.
The good thing about the Japanese when it comes to foreigners speaking their language is that they have patience and don't mind you making mistakes, they've also got a good sense of humour so they'll find it more funny than offensive and give you the "nihongo josu" compliment.
> The good thing about the Japanese when it comes to foreigners speaking their language is that they have patience and don't mind you making mistakes.
In fact, they like you making mistakes. Much has been written by sociolinguists about how conservative Japanese are uncomfortable with foreigners speaking Japanese too well: it puts the foreignеr in an uncanny valley where his/her speech doesn’t match his/her foreign looks, or it offends their sense of firm ethnic boundaries.
Yeah we noticed a way more laid-back reception on our last trip, but we didn't encounter as many elderly Japanese as we did in years past (I assume because of ongoing COVID fears). Definitely not as much rigid formality with the younger crowd.
As far from what I know (I study in Japan in a non-technical English language program) people do have been able to work and live in Japan without knowing Japanese at all, especially with Google Translate coming.
However!
It's quite hard to deal with the bureaucracy if you stick with GTranslate only.
But for other purposes, it's very fine. The Japanese themselves are not into small talks so...
"IT firm Hennge KK designated English as its in-company language for all workers in 2016."
[...]
"The policy, however, made it harder to find Japanese engineers than previously. Some have shied away from talking in English. There were even some who quit Hennge because of the change."
An example of this where it was critical was airline pilots in Korea. After a series of crashes in the 90s (I think) they mandated English in the cockpit to reset the cultural burden of subservience to more senior pilots.
> The shift was made with the corporation’s shortfall in engineers in mind. Finding it difficult to secure enough Japanese, Money Forward decided to replace Japanese with English to attract foreign personnel.
How many English speakers are they attracting? I would imagine national immigration policy is the primary limiting factor for how many English speaking software engineers a company could attract. There's plenty of qualified people in the North American and Europe that would be interested in working in Japan while speaking English.
It's true; I have many more coworkers from China (+SE Asia) than from America. There's tons of IT professionals from China living in Tokyo.
I haven't met too many Vietnamese though, but I have met a couple. Japan also attracts a lot of Filipinos (though not so much in the IT sector, in my experience).
In higher skill/seniority levels ~30m salary (+equity/bonus) isn't outrageous expectations (the reason it might be unheard of is social/cultural). Even for ICs, not necessarily execs or managers. The positions/people I've encountered in this range have been for multinationals, 10+ yoe.
These levels are entirely in line with what you can expect in Europe unless you are willing to do incredibly unethical work. Even then it is hard to go far over. I'd go so far as to say these are normal salary ranges, even.
You can look at salary ranges on levels.fyi to get some indication of what pay is in different companies and cities in the US. For top level companies you can be looking at starting salaries around $150k for Bay Area.
I'm American; I know what salaries in the US are like. My point is there's no average salary; as the other person said, it can range between $40K and $4M.
If someone says something about the salaries explicitly they have numbers in mind and theories on how they should map. That's what I was after, and it's what I got. I think your stance that an average salary does not exist is nonsense, especially if you look at averages for seniority levels in relatively wealthy areas (which the entirety of Japan is).
My stance is that an "average salary" is pointless because the range is simply too wide and depends on too many factors to condense into a 1-sentence reply.
Also, the entirety of Japan isn't relatively wealthy, just like the US. The rural areas are dramatically cheaper to live in (for housing mainly) than the big cities. However, there's less "spread" than in the US: all the software jobs are going to be in a handful of large cities, not in some remote prefecture or village (whereas in the US, there are jobs in some smaller and even very small cities, where that one employer is likely the only place you can get such a job nearby and you'll have to move if the job goes bad). But even if you just look at Tokyo, the pay range can be enormous, at least a full order of magnitude.
...that being said, this is also kind of inevitable. Masahiro Sakurai[1] talked about this in a video, about how he has to remind Japanese developers to name all their files and functions in English. Just in case they need to bring on foreign contractors. Japanese programmers are already slinging around a lot of English relative to the average resident of Tokyo, even if it's all wasei-eigo[2].
[0] What a waste!
[1] Designer of Kirby and Smash Bros. Now runs a YouTube channel on game development, which has an English version translated by 8-1.
Yes that is the same people that translated UNDERTALE into Japanese and yes it's because Toby Fox recommended them.
[2] Made-in-Japan English. Japanese is like 10-20% English by volume, so sometimes they'll just make up new English words. Sometimes they even get loanworded back into English!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gairaigo_and_wasei-eig...