I wrote this piece a few years ago for another site. My Job and contract have changed since then and I teach my classes now with a mixture of English and Japanese. But I thought it was still somewhat interesting and perhaps even entertaining. I hope you enjoy it.

Japanese people don’t speak English. I cannot stress this enough. Sure a few Japanese people speak English and they speak it very well. But as a whole, and even after six years of mandatory English classes, Japanese people on the whole simply cannot speak English.

But why should they have to learn English? It’s Japan after all. And how many Americans speak Japanese? Why force our imperialistic language on the people of Japan? These are all very valid points and should be discussed further, but it doesn’t change the fact that right now, today, and for the foreseeable future, I am an English teacher in Japan and have to deal with the fact that they don’t speak it.

One of the conditions of my contract is that while at the schools I am supposed to converse with the students entirely in English and let the Japanese English teachers explain things like grammar and sentence structure. I am there as a conversation teacher. As I teach a total of about 1000 students between 3 schools (each class sees me only about twice a month), it can be a frustrating job.

At first it was very easy to not speak any Japanese with the students, owing to the fact that I err.. didn’t speak any Japanese. However, in the time I have been living in Japan I have picked up a lot of the language, I am not fluent by any means, but I can hold a simple conversation or two. My students on the other hand, seem to become less fluent as they advance through school. In other words, the older they get the lower their English proficiency becomes. I have no explanation for why this might be.

For example, if I ask any given 7th grade student, “How are you?” most can answer, “I’m fine thank you and you?” which is what the textbook says is the proper answer. A few of the more clever kids will give me an original answer. But all I will get from 9th graders in response to this question is blank stares and the word “Wakaranai” (I don’t understand). Last year on the day of Jr. High school graduation I went up to one of the graduates and tried to find out how he was feeling on this special day. I kept it simple. I just asked, “How are you today?” He looked at me puzzled. I asked again “How are you today?” A light of recognition struck him and he answered me. “Today.. Tuesday!” Education in Action.

So how do I cope when it seems that communication is impossible. How do I close the gap? By finding the lowest common denominator, pop culture.

I thought to myself, where might these students have been exposed to English? The most obvious place was music. If you listen to J-pop you will notice that the majority of the songs contain English words and phrases and some will even have their entire chorus in English. The English in these songs ranges from pretty good to “oh that was in English? I couldn’t tell”. The grammar is usually slaughtered and the sentences make little or no sense but there is a lot of vocabulary that is repeated in many songs. The students are learning these words. All my students know, for example “I love you”, “destiny”, “Never forget me” and “Be my baby”.

Sadly most of this language deals with romantic concepts and if I decided to use it with my students I would likely be fired or make the front page of the newspaper, probably both.

So I needed something else. It didn’t really strike me until I was moving a rather heavy TV from one room to another, and was slowed down, in a hallway, by some chatty, slow-walking students who didn’t understand my urgency to not have a 29-inch CRT television in my arms. At first I tried saying “Could you please move out of the way?” No reaction. They must have thought I was speaking to someone else, as it couldn’t have been them I was speaking that strange language to. I tried again, this time I simply said, “Move!” Now they knew I was talking to them and stopped moving all together so they could give me their full attention. At this point I would have waved my arms to indicate that they were in danger of being squished by a massive TV but I couldn’t as I was carrying said massive TV. As I was about to drop it I thought of something. In a loud voice I said “Hey! B-Dash!” They looked confused for a second and then put two and two together and realized that I wanted them to move.

After this experience, and after looking up the Japanese word for run, (It’s “hashiru”by the way) I realized that there were many video game words that my students would understand. They understand “jump”, “mushroom”, “fireball”and “princess” Actually those words are not so useful in everyday conversation but I kept finding new words that I could actually use.

It turns out a lot of words in video games are not translated to Japanese but rather left in English to make the game seem more exotic. Of course these words are still written phonetically in Japanese characters, but the pronunciation is similar. Words like “adventure”, “attack”, “life”, “gold”, “key”,
“door”and “treasure”can all be found in games. Sometimes it is also the systems themselves that add vocabulary. When I want students to memorize something I can use the word “memory” which they know from “memory card”. They know the word “color” from “Gameboy Color”; they know the word “touch”from the DS ad campaign (although this is another word that might get me on the front page of the newspaper). They know pocket from Neo-geo Pocket and Pocket pikachu. When they are late for class I could say “time over”and they would hurry before their homeroom teachers notice. And I can end games we play in class with “Game Over”.

Do I really think they have learned all these words from games? Not really. They may have learned a few new words from games but mostly games are a reflection of the words that Japanese people are already familiar with. If a word appears in a game, there is a good chance that if I use that word, Japanese people will understand me. I keep these keywords in a little word bank in my head for situations where I am having a communication problem. And I owe it all to games. So if anyone ever criticizes you for spending too much time in front of your console you can simply tell them “I am increasing my international communication skills”. If they look confused and don’t understand your point, it is probably because they haven’t been playing enough video games to properly communicate with you. Game Over.