ABSTRACT
Drawing upon the latest literature review and my research findings (Kobayashi, 2013), this chapter, that consists of three main sections, addresses the unexplored mismatch between Japan’s decades-long poor English education and its status as the world’s top-class economy. For example, the first section explores why Japanese nationals’ consistently low English proficiency has coexisted with Japan’s internationally competitive economic status since the 1970s. The case of Japan is compared with that of South Korea whose smaller domestic market increases its higher dependency on foreign trade, which heightens the significance of English-speaking young people educated in overseas education to the point where Korean children migrate to English-speaking nations for early study abroad. Amid a growing body of discussion that juxtaposes English skills with national/personal competitiveness in East Asia, such relationship is argued to be contentious in Japan’s economy sustained by the monolingual workforce educated in domestic schooling. The chapter concludes with the future outlook of scholarly discussion on Japan’s decades-long, reform-resistant English education in the increasingly volatile world.
