Once upon a time, to walk through Japanese streets as a foreigner was to experience all the dislocation of illiteracy.

You might have wandered for hours without ever knowing where you were; you might have meditated on the beauty of kanji – the language’s logographic characters – without ever understanding a depicted idea; you might have selected from a restaurant’s pre-paid options, and randomly chosen tripe for breakfast.

The fabled time to which I refer was 2018, on my first visit to Japan.

Stopping off on my way to Oz, Tokyo was sufficiently discombobulating that I invented ‘micro tourism’ as a means of coping. I took to walking around the block of my hotel, for three days solid.

On the third day, I arose and had eggs for breakfast.

***

I have returned to Japan – for the guts of three months, not three days. In subtle ways, I notice things are shifting. Is this the dawn of a new Japanese sun? Or the delusions of a universe of one?

**

Events shape nations.

Since 2018, the global pandemic has played out in the national psyche; the conservative Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has been assassinated; his protégée Sanae Takaichi is just elected as the country’s first female Prime Minister, on a muscular, ‘Japanese First’ platform.

Across those seven years, the population has continued to shrink (by 1.75% to its current 124 million).

Turning in this widening gyre, precedent-smashing events may quicken.

My journeying so far has been in rural areas and medium-sized cities and my comments are hardly a national survey. But so much is fascinating, inscrutable and moving about Japan and her people. This much is clear.

To my Western eyes, this is a society using alternative software to ours. We each get from A to B in our own unique ways.

The question is, for how much longer will this be so?

***

‘When you read you begin with A, B, C’.

Julie Andrews’ famous adage is, of course, untrue of Japanese. And yet, I note a dramatic increase in written English in public spaces and services. Indeed, in places it is executed in the manner of a second official language, although little that is official underpins it.

On the bus, I may not know my fare or where I’m going, but the screen above the driver’s head alerts passengers that ‘the bus is about to move’.

On the bullet train, the chyron informs me that ‘we will make a brief stop in Kobe’, and encourages departing passengers to be ready at the door, before the train stops.

The march of English is replicated in the private sphere.

Brand advertising is sometimes led by English, that great signifier of outer-directedness, with Japanese characters there as a rescue net for those failing to keep up.

Young adults walk the streets in their fast fashion, emblazoned with English aphorisms, teams and place names. Yesterday, I saw teenage girls with ‘hip plushies’ slung over their shoulders. One windowed display was framed by a slogan: ‘One day my time will come’.

The preponderance of soft toys is such a charming Japanese mystery. I once found a tiny one abandoned on the street is Saijo, and felt compelled to photograph it in situ, before bringing it home.

To return to my subject, perhaps I am exaggerating the increase of English usage here. And perhaps not. A hair specialist once told me that men only notice they are balding after they have lost 50% of their follicles.   

Whatever the situation, there is a central paradox in the Japanese adoption of English. And it is evident once you engage with Japanese people.

Few – and I mean very few – actually speak English. Despite the preponderance of the written word, only a smattering of Japanese tongues have tasted the language of Shakespeare.

Unlike most non-English-speaking countries I have visited, the Japanese people show little interest in learning, practicing or listening to English.

I have wrestled for the right to speak German and not English in Berlin. Parisians have had the temerity to address me in my mother tongue. But by and large, the Japanese would rather make a grab for Google translate.

In Imabari, Shikoku I thought my luck was changing when the elderly owner of a traditional café clarified if indeed I wanted ‘hot coffee’. Later that day, I discovered that the Japanese for hot coffee is ホットコーヒー, pronounced ‘Hottokōhī’.

***

Change is a coming, though it will take time. It is only in 2020 that English became a formal, examinable subject in primary schools.

But culture as well as education may explain the ambivalence I observe.

Perhaps it is because English signifies more than a functional communication. Perhaps it signals the demystifying of all that Japan holds dear. In welcoming English, the Japanese may be forced to lay bare the precious secrets behind the kanji.

I am reminded of Joni Mitchell’s central idea in her beautiful Both Sides ballad: ‘Something’s lost and something’s gained in living every day’.

Every nation has a natural instinct to self-protect, just as it feels an impulse to explore.

The fate of English in Japan will be a measure of both.