When I was teaching English to Japanese business people in the late '80s, the main purpose was to prepare them for overseas assignments. In many cases, the students were not management people, but technicians and blue-collar workers. They were being sent to the U.S. or Europe to train employees in factories that their companies had either set up or bought outright from local companies.
Most of these workers had little or no English language ability to start with, so we drilled them in phrases that would help them get their work done. If there was time, we'd also teach them how to handle everyday situations, anything from ordering a meal to asking directions.
Those were halcyon days for the English-teaching industry in Japan. In the early '90s a lot of the work dried up and many language companies, in fact, went out of business; which isn't to say that Japanese companies didn't need English language training any more. But once the red ink started to flow, education sank lower in the budget.