Today I took a day off. As you may know, taking a day off on weekday can makes you refresh. Please try it.
Watching this video, I thought English spoken by Japanese is very easy to catch. In this video, Mikitani san speaks English. It's easy to listen to.
English spoken by native speaker sounds more complicated because of its pronunciation. Especially when they naturally talk, it's too difficult to understand what they say. Conversation is not so difficult. I may even know all words they spoke.
My colleague quit the job last week. He went to my place to say good bye on Friday which is his last day. I hadn't known about that he quits our company. So it was a big surprise to me.
I asked him the reason why he had decided to quit.
He said, "Well, I wanna become a comedian..."
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee???
and he also said, "I will go to Tokyo soon and enter into the training school of Jinrikisya."
Jinrikisya is a one of big companies which have famous comedians.
I didn't think he is a that kind of person who is interested in comedy.
So I've never thought that he has such a big dream.
I hope that he become a big comedian and I can see him on TV sometime.
1つはインタビューの中で渡辺謙が"Acting is memory"と言っている通り、「記憶する」ってことだと思います。俳優さんなので台詞を覚えるのは当然のことですが、謙さんはこうも言ってます。"Acting is memory. Dialogue, moving, feeling and everything." つまり、そのシーンの会話、動き、感情、全て(を記憶することが演技だ)。その人物になり切って演じる、台詞はもちろん動き、感情も全て記憶する。フレーズや単語だけで覚えるのではなく、シーン全体が焼き付いてるから記憶に定着しやすいんですね。確かに、英語の台詞を意味まで理解して感情を込めて演じているのと、机の上で「英会話よく使うフレーズ100」みたいなのを暗記するのとでは、覚えやすさ、忘れにくさ、そのあと実際に日常生活で使える応用力は格段に違ってくると思います。英語で演じる、そのシーンを本気で体験するってのは、生活の中で英会話を実践する英語圏への留学と同じ効果がある。台詞を完璧に覚えるって点では留学以上の効果があるはずです。
A video news of WSJ features Rakuten, who mandates its employees to speak English. Fast Retailing, Japanese apparel company and has Uniqlo as their main brand, also announced that they prepare for the start to use English on work in Japan effective in March 2012. They say it's neccessary for Japanese company to survive as worldwide companies.
This topic is controversial and there are some opinions like "It's not efficient to speak English even among Japanese employees.", "Isn't it over-the-top?", or "Those who work with high performance and cannot speak English will go down. But those who work with low performance but are good at English will gain power.". Personally, these opinions are missing the point.
This movement to mandate employees to speak English is a message that "We would like people who have higher skill and performance to work with, regardless of their nationalities." That means even Japanese companies do not treat Japanese people favorably. They recruit people who have excellent skills from all over the world in order to survive in a world market. And then they will become multinational companies where foreign people account for more than 50% of the company's employees. So they mandate its employees to speak English from now on.
So this is not just a revision of in-house rule but a much bigger change in direction of company's stance. Three opinions above are basing on a premise that Japanese people are necessary. That's why they seem to be missing the point. Rakuten and Fast Retailing are saying that Japanese people are not vital any more.
Think about other Japanese companies.
Definitely they want to get excellent employees from all over the world. Take Panasonic, they have shifted to recruiting 80% of their new empolyees from foreign countries. I think especially giant companies will have this tendency in near future. Otherwise, they cannot survive.
Rakuten and Fast Retailing seem to be rather kind than over-the-top in terms of letting their employees to know in advance.
In case of Rakuten, they have created an environment where all of the employees can practice English by changing every Japanese letters into english such as menu of its cafeteria. Their stance is that let's do our best to survive this change even if there are some confusion in this 2 or 3 years. Their compulsory attitude that requires employees's cooperativeness is a typical culture of Japanese companies but is also a sort of kind.
Japanese companies can recruit to imcrease foreign people without letting existing Japanese employees know the importance of English. If they do so, sometime in the future, foreign employees who account for 70-80% of all employees would say "Why are we using Japanese? Is it inefficient?" By then it would be too late for us to say "No English!".