ABSTRACT
The good sales of Japan’s major business magazines’ front-cover special issues on English self-study methods would be implausible in many other countries where English proficiency is a must-have skill for elite job candidates and those who seek white-collar, decent jobs. This chapter is actuated by Japan’s major business magazines’ periodic publications of front-cover feature issues on English study methods since 2010, the year when Japan ceded its spot as the world’s second-largest economy to China. It analyzes Japan’s four business magazines’ 19 special issues on English study methods published from 2012 to 2017 by taking into account the Japanese business world’s conventional employment of monolingual college male graduates as future global human resources, an unthinkable practice in many other Asian and European global companies that demand internationally competitive English proficiency from job candidates (see also Chapter 6).
In conclusion, Japanese business magazines’ special issues on English study methods are argued to be the window on the Japanese business world where its global companies continue abiding by their non-global, gender-inequality hiring practices amid the growing sense of uncertainty over their capacity to survive in the fierce global competition.
