Japanese is spoken on a single archipelago off the coast of east Asia, English is the international business language. Like big props to them did going from an eastern to western language in learning it but there’s practical reasons for learning English if you intend to travel a lot or work in a multinational company as it’s the language that give you the most bang for your buck. There just isn’t nearly as much incentive to learn Japanese.
For what it's worth, at the peak of Japanese colonialism, the language was used in Taiwan, Korea, Micronesia, Manchuria, and tentatively forced on occupied territories like Guam - now they can only force the language on their two remaining colonies, Hokkaido and Okinawa.
There's no real post-colonial discourse in Japan other than J-nationalist weebs like HiraganaNinja whining about how much it sucks to be kicked out of most of their colonies, and Why can't those former colonies just be grateful to Japan???
So a lot of this "Hur dur why do I have to speak English but you don't have to speak Japanese" is just lingering imperialist resentment that foreigners don't "know their place" and acknowledge Japan's inherent ethnic superiority. How dare they make me speak English???
You can see it in a lot of the ethnonationalist weebs' copy-pasted rants - they're so used to being able to talk down to and talk over minorities that when they go on the internet, they lose their mind because the "foreigners" (J-nat'lists never acknowledge that they're the foreigners here) don't automatically defer to them.
But that's also why SO MANY comments from these start with, "I'm Japanese, and..." They genuinely just believe that's their trump card, and everyone will just do as they say. Like, if you try to say, y'know, Japan is a bit racist, you'll get told "I'm Japanese and I've never experienced racism in Japan, you are the real racist for disrespecting me."
And it's just like, lol, no, that's not how ANY of this works.
284
u/Dear-Ad-7028 2d ago
Japanese is spoken on a single archipelago off the coast of east Asia, English is the international business language. Like big props to them did going from an eastern to western language in learning it but there’s practical reasons for learning English if you intend to travel a lot or work in a multinational company as it’s the language that give you the most bang for your buck. There just isn’t nearly as much incentive to learn Japanese.