My sister lived in Japan for like a decade, and she sometimes complained to me that she'd try to talk to people in Japanese (she is quite fluent in it) but they'd respond in English because she's very clearly not ethnically Japanese. Sometimes she would keep replying in Japanese but a lot of people never switched to it, so it would get weird and she'd eventually switch back to English.
So, you know, stuff like that might also play a role. Japan is a kind of weird example for this because it's a very insular culture that can often be pretty xenophobic.
edit to add: Also, I'm pretty sure JET (the main way that Americans get to live and work in Japan) actively discourages fluent Japanese speakers from applying, or at least used to. My sister tried to apply with them right after graduation (after spending a year in Japan as a student) and was told that her fluency in Japanese was actually a problem, because it's an immersion program and they don't want teachers falling back on communication in Japanese. Or that was my understanding, I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. This was like 25 years ago, my memory is not that great and also things may have changed a lot.
The struggle to speak the native language is a thing in a lot of countries. When I moved to Sweden, it was so hard to get people to actually talk to me in Swedish because if I said something slightly wrong to identify that I wasn't native, they switched to English immediately. I understand it's mostly being courteous, but dammit is it annoying.
Not just being courteous, but some will switch to English because they suddenly have the opportunity to speak English to a native English speaker, and so can practice. One of the problems I had learning a foreign language was that, outside of class, I never had an opportunity to speak with anyone in that language, so I just started un-learning it the instant I was out of class.
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u/Loud_Insect_7119 2d ago edited 2d ago
My sister lived in Japan for like a decade, and she sometimes complained to me that she'd try to talk to people in Japanese (she is quite fluent in it) but they'd respond in English because she's very clearly not ethnically Japanese. Sometimes she would keep replying in Japanese but a lot of people never switched to it, so it would get weird and she'd eventually switch back to English.
So, you know, stuff like that might also play a role. Japan is a kind of weird example for this because it's a very insular culture that can often be pretty xenophobic.
edit to add: Also, I'm pretty sure JET (the main way that Americans get to live and work in Japan) actively discourages fluent Japanese speakers from applying, or at least used to. My sister tried to apply with them right after graduation (after spending a year in Japan as a student) and was told that her fluency in Japanese was actually a problem, because it's an immersion program and they don't want teachers falling back on communication in Japanese. Or that was my understanding, I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. This was like 25 years ago, my memory is not that great and also things may have changed a lot.