Foreigners Who Have Lived in Japan for Decades but Cannot Speak Japanese

The other day, I was watching a documentary.

It was set in an aging danchi, a large housing complex in the suburbs of Tokyo. Built during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth, the complex now has an increasingly elderly population.

At the same time, perhaps because apartment prices in central Tokyo have soared, younger people have apparently begun moving into its renovated units.

There were elderly residents who had to keep working because their pensions were not enough to live on, people who had found a sense of purpose in local volunteer work, and young families. As always, the program was excellent at showing the lives of ordinary people.

Among them, one American man caught my attention.

He was elderly and had once worked as an English teacher in Japan.

He had lived in Japan for many years, but I was surprised when I heard his interview.

His Japanese was remarkably poor.

This was not simply a matter of having a foreign accent. His vocabulary was limited, and he struggled to form sentences. To be honest, his Japanese was extremely rough.

After living in Japan for decades, was this really the result?

Is Japanese Unnecessary Even When You Live in Japan?

In fact, I had previously seen a similar British man on the same program.

He too had lived in Japan for many years, yet his Japanese had barely improved.

When you think about it, foreigners working as English teachers in Japan can do their jobs without using Japanese.

Classes are conducted in English. Conversations with other foreigners are also in English. For everyday shopping, a few words of broken Japanese are enough to get by.

If they have a Japanese spouse, they can leave complicated administrative procedures to their partner.

In other words, even after decades in Japan, it is possible to maintain an environment in which there is no need to study Japanese seriously.

I still take online English lessons, and I know from painful experience how difficult it is to acquire a foreign language.

That is precisely why I cannot help questioning people who have lived in a country for decades without learning much of the local language.

After living there for so long, did they never want to have deeper conversations with the people of that country?

Do They Love Japan, or Do They Love Their Life in Japan?

I once saw a foreigner who spoke Japanese at a near-native level make an interesting observation on YouTube.

During Japan’s economic bubble and the era of the strong yen, many foreigners came to Japan to make money, he said.

It was a time when being a native English speaker was enough to find work and enjoy a relatively comfortable life in Japan.

But the Japanese economy has changed completely.

The yen has weakened, and teaching English in Japan is no longer necessarily as financially attractive as it once was.

The video also discussed people who had come to Japan expecting the favorable conditions of the past and were now unable to adapt to the changed environment.

Having made the effort to study Japanese culture himself, the speaker went so far as to make the rather extreme statement that such people should never have come to Japan in the first place.

Living in Japan and taking an interest in Japanese culture are not necessarily the same thing.

Japan is safe. The food is good. Daily life is convenient. People are free to live in Japan for those reasons.

But when someone has lived here for decades and still speaks almost no Japanese, it looks a little strange to me.

Do they love Japan as a country? Or do they love the comfort of living in Japan as a foreigner?

The two may sound similar, but they are quite different.

Can You Understand a Country Without Learning Its Language?

Learning a foreign language does more than enable you to hold conversations.

What do people in that country think about? What makes them laugh? What makes them angry? Some things become visible only when you understand their language.

Through my own study of English, I have come to appreciate how closely language and culture are connected.

That is why I cannot help feeling uneasy about people who live in Japan for decades without trying to learn Japanese.

I am not saying that everyone must pass the highest level of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test.

It does not matter if their pronunciation is poor or their grammar is incorrect. The issue is that even after many years, there is no visible effort to acquire the language.

I cannot help seeing that as a question of respect for the culture.

Does Simply Being in Japan Mean You Know Japan?

Ultimately, you do not acquire a foreign language simply by living in the country where it is spoken. If you do not need it, you will not use it. If you are not interested, you will not study it.

For these people, Japan may have become merely a place to live rather than a place to encounter and learn about another culture.

Even so, I still find it difficult to understand how someone can live in a country for decades and barely speak its language.

It would be such a waste to come all the way to Japan and reach the end of your life without ever being able to have a deep conversation with Japanese people.

Then again, I was born in Tokyo and have lived here for more than half a century, yet I have never been to the top of Tokyo Skytree.

Perhaps people are most likely to postpone the things they assume they can do at any time.

Still, never visiting Tokyo Skytree causes no real difficulty. Spending your entire life in Japan without learning Japanese surely does.