Panel pushes ‘special English zones’ to promote Japan culture

Kyodo

An expert committee proposed Tuesday that Japan create “special English zones” to enhance communication in English as part of the government’s strategy to promote Japanese culture abroad.

In a proposal submitted to administrative reform minister Tomomi Inada, the experts said companies in these zones would receive preferential tax treatment if they adopt English as their common language.

The panel also recommended that the government provide subsidies to TV stations that offer English subtitles and subchannels.

Under the Cool Japan initiative, the government is building up its promotion of Japanese culture overseas toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

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  • kyushuphil

    I hope many teachers enthusiastically seek to join these “special zones.”

    Once discussions get going in classrooms, I hope teachers will ask for student writing as their thoughts all range, with good connections between Japanese and other cultures. Have the student writings regularly distributed to each other, with teachers also teaching the literacy for students in subsequent writings to enjoy and refer to points made earlier by fellow students.

    All may well know that, when Japanese students meet foreigners — in travels or work abroad, or here in Japan — everyone will appreciate input from the Japanese on aspects of their own culture that may well connect with others.

    • doninjapan

      Actually… I’d rather have the students DISCUSS their responses – as this is where the void exists the most.
      Whilst exploring the mechanics of a language is important, being able to use it as a communicative tool is paramount.

      • Stephen Tetsu

        Indeed. I don’t care so much as to whether what someone says is 100% grammatically accurate as long as they are capable of a two way exchange of information.

      • kyushuphil

        If you’ve been about in the world, you’ll know people in business, the arts, NGO’s, and multiple other fields all have great patience and openness towards the many odd forms English takes as an international language.

        Do we give up on schools to foster better writing from students, because we automatically assume all teachers to be only robots for grammatical tyranny?

    • midnightbrewer

      What role could teachers possibly play in these special English zones? The article says these zones are for businesses, not for schools.

      I’ve been teaching here for 12 years, and the biggest challenge teachers face is the dogmatic emphasis on perfect grammar, not communication. The fundamental problem with Japanese students is that they receive no encouragement to express themselves, rendering the mastery of English useless. The students want to study what will be on the test; creative writing isn’t part of that.

      The fundamental flaw in Japanese English teaching goes back a hundred years. Merely creating a zone isn’t going to solve the problem. In fact, it shows the continuing problem of their perception of “us” versus “them”. This contains the issue of taking internationalization and putting it in a box, allowing life in the rest of the country to go on as usual.

      • kyushuphil

        Sad but true what you say about the schools.

        They stress only formalities — all that grammar — and only for tests, not for human interaction.

        But it’s also true that Japanese culture richly comes from people who dreaded life in boxes. So many great directors of films, writers, poets — so many could stress the human precisely being more human for locating oneself and others in those larger, dreadful contexts of the deadened public games to which so many so largely must reduce themselves.

        Good for you being here 12 years, still teaching, even if amidst so many Japanese teachers systematically trained to have no feeling, no understanding, no respect for their own great culture.

        It’s happening now, too, in my own native U.S., where universities become mainly home to biz ed, and K-12 only markets for profiteering private and public-charter schools and standardized testing to kill the rest of public ed.