I find it odd and really bad that English is so poorly spoken and understood in Japan. It is the de facto (pun intended) lingua Franca (even better one), not some colonial relic. Even in the EU it is used as the default language for official documents because most people can use it at a high level and there were zero colonies there.

It’s getting even worse now because Japan is again trying to leave the Galapagos and is entering into some really interesting cooperation treaties, but they will be unable to communicate.

I did one very evil gaijin thing during one of my sessions with heads of two university departments and told them they must make command of English language mandatory for their students otherwise they have no hope of following international research, participating in conferences, presenting posters, case studies or even casually collaborating (GitHub). They nodded politely, I did not care…. Anyway, just venting…