再English to the fore, April 13th 2013 P83 社内公用語英語
Hiroshi Mikitani, the boss of Rakuten, an e-commerce giant, is that rare thing in Japan：a businessman who wants radically to change society, but who also has the ear of the Japanese establishment. He is currently advising the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, on a programme of structual reforms to be announced later this year. Some of Mr Mikitani's beliefs, and his business practices, nevertheless remain delightfully outsiderish. According to his new book, ゛Market-place 3.0゛, Japan's bureaucrats exert control simply by emphasising the Japanese language. They do nothing about the country's glaring lack of English-language skills. In this way, he says, people are kept inwardly focused, largely uninterested in the world beyond their coastline, and under the thumb of the state. He repeats the do's and don'ts of Rakuten's rather odd corprate culture (do get your executives to clean their own offices, including polishing their chair legs). But most people will want to know more about what happened when Mr Mikitani single-handedly took on the bureaucrats and tried to turn Japan's gaze outwards. One Monday morning in 2010 Mr Mikitani, whose English was perfected at Harvard Business School, unleashed ゛Englishnization゛on his thousands of stunned employees. From that day on, he said, the company would conduct its business entirely in English. By the next morning, all cafeteria menus and lift directories had been replaced with English ones. All meetings began to be conducted in English, even if people stammered for long periods. The move generated newspapers headlines across the country and the boss of Honda declared the move to be ゛stupid゛. As the book reveals, Mr Mikitani's aims as a culture-changer seem to have clashed with his instincts as a hard-driving businessman. Instead of leading employees gently towards a more global mindset, he set his people a short deadline to learn English and insisted they do it in their spare time and at their expense. If they did not meet certain targets, they risked being demoted or even fired. Such treatment seems to have been effective inside the firm. But it remains to be seen whether spreading English by the sword at Rakuten is serving as an inspiration or as a warning to other companies and workers. Mr Mikitani is far from alone in noting how badly Japan scores English-language skills compared with its neighbours - lower even than isolated North Korea in some recent tests. And many people are perplexed about why every year, fewer and fewer of Japan's young people want to study abroad. Too many companies restrict themselves to the domestic market. In an interconnected world such insularity leads to economic ruin, Mr Mikitani says. ゛Marketplace 3.0゛also contains much homespun wisdom about business. The Rakuten meeting system, in which materials get handed out well in advance, cutting time spent in meeting by 90%, deserves to be copied well beyond Japan. Most employees, says Mr Mikitani, have large stores of untapped potential and are not working at full capacity. The author, for his part, is working hard behind the scenes to create what his book calls ゛New Japan゛.
