SAEKO UJIIE -

IMPACTS AND IMPLICATIONS OF ADOPTION OF ENGLISH AS CORPORATE OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN JAPAN : ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC/ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Major Japanese companies’ new policy of mandating English as the official language has been receiving attention since a well-known E-commerce company in Japan announced their policy to implement English-only corporate language policy in 2010. But the language policy could pose challenges for Japanese businesspeople. Japan belongs to the Kachru’s expanding circle, where the language has no official status, although it is widely studied as a foreign language as a lingua franca. The present study examines the problems and difficulties experienced implementing English as official language policy where the language is not intra-national communication medium. It is based on the interviews of the human resource director and the manager of a Japanese company, who are in charge of implementing the corporate language policy to mandate English as their official corporate language, and its employees who experienced the changes caused by the new policy.

Saeko Ujiie is an international business consultant and an adjunct lecturer at Kokushikan University. Having worked at Morgan Stanley, UBS and Merrill Lynch in London and New York. Saeko holds MBA from Northwestern University, MA from the UC Berkeley, BA from Waseda, and is working for Ph.D. at Waseda University.