English as a Means,
Not the Goal

English can be learned in Japan

Let me start with the blunt truth: you can learn English in Japan. Online English lessons can be taken from your living room, every morning if you like. Japan even used to have a catchphrase, “study abroad at the station”, for the English schools in front of every train station. The age of studying abroad without boarding a plane arrived long ago.

If English is the only goal, moving the whole family across the sea may be a bit of a detour. All the more so when you count the moving boxes.

My own English, by the way, is like a secret house sauce. A base of Japanese English, topped up with the air of Hong Kong, then left to mature in Singapore for many years. The result is a flavour in which even I cannot tell whether the accent is Japanese or simply the effect of breathing too much Chinese-speaking air. The grammar crumbles now and then, but it crumbles with remarkable consistency. Perfect broken English, you might say. I would not recommend it as a model.

Not just learning English, but learning in English

You can learn English in Japan. Learning in English is much harder to do there. English is the tool; the real work comes after. In scholarship and in the arts alike, there are vastly more books in English than in Japanese. New research and information appear in English first. Wait for the translation and you are late, and some of the fine detail falls out along the way. Learn in English, and you can reach the world’s bookshelf directly.

My daughter’s piano is a good example. Her regular lessons are with a teacher from Hong Kong and a Chinese-Malaysian teacher. At house concerts, she gets pointers from a Russian pianist. The teachers’ mother tongues are Cantonese, Chinese and Russian, but the lessons are in English. She is not learning English. She is learning piano, in English.

The Japanese circle is comfortable

Malaysia has neighbourhoods where Japanese people live comfortably. There are supermarkets stocked with Japanese food, hospitals where Japanese is spoken, and international schools with many Japanese pupils. The children play in Japanese at break time. The parents have tea in Japanese after the school run.

Nobody is at fault. Finding people who speak your language in a foreign land is a relief; that is only natural. Even I feel a little reassured when I see a Japanese menu at the end of a long day.

But children watch their parents’ backs. If the parents live only inside the Japanese circle, the children find it hard to step out of it too. They may learn English at school, but after school and at weekends, life runs in Japanese.

Whether the parents’ English is good matters less than you might think. Children’s English usually overtakes their parents’ in no time. What matters is not how well the parents speak, but whether they are seen stepping outside the circle. A parent laughing with a hawker in clumsy English, Malay or Chinese teaches far more than a fluent speech.

Visas keep parents inside the circle

Staying inside the circle is not only a matter of personality. The visa system plays a big part.

The visa most often used for education migration is the Guardian Pass. It lets one parent live in Malaysia alongside a child on a student pass. But that parent cannot work or run a business in Malaysia. Some schools also ask the parent who does not live here to prove an income of around RM25,000 a month.

So in many families, the mother and children live in Malaysia while the father works in Japan. It is a natural result that a mother who cannot work ends up spending her days with Japanese people in the same position. This is a shape created not by personality, but by the system.

There are ways for both parents to live here. Work in Malaysia on an employment pass. Set up your own company. There is also a visa for digital nomads, which lets you live here while continuing remote work for clients abroad. But each comes with conditions and effort, and none suits everyone.

Even on a visa that does not allow work, there is room for ingenuity. Join a sports club. Take Malay or Chinese classes. Turn up at local festivals or volunteer. Add one non-Japanese acquaintance at a time. The way out of the circle is often closer to home than you think.

Work back from the exit

One more thing to think about is the exit. When the children grow up, where will they go to university, and where will they work?

If the exit is a famous Japanese university and a job in Japan, a Malaysian education has many disadvantages. Japan’s entrance exams are built around the Japanese school curriculum. There are separate entrance routes for returnees, but the places are limited.

The question of university names is an interesting one. The world ranking of Universiti Malaya, Malaysia’s top university, changes a great deal depending on the yardstick. In QS, which weighs reputation and internationality heavily, it is 56th; compared on the previous year’s figures, it sits almost level with Kyoto University. In THE, which balances teaching and research, it is 194th. In the Shanghai ranking, which looks only at research output such as Nobel prizes and papers, it is in the 600s. The same university is 56th, 194th or in the 600s depending on the yardstick. Within Malaysia, though, it is close to the top by any measure. Yet in Japan, hardly anyone knows its name. Say “Universiti Malaya” at a Japanese job interview, and you might be asked whether you studied the Maya civilisation.

Rankings change with the yardstick, but name recognition in Japan stays low by any yardstick. The question is not which is right, but which yardstick you choose to live by. Live by Japan’s, and you need to prepare for Japan’s exams. Live by the world’s, and Malaysia can be a shortcut. Choose only the entrance without deciding the exit, and the yardsticks will not match later.

Go local, parents included

My ideal is for the whole family, parents included, to go local. To mix with Japanese people and people from other countries alike. To make the rounds of Hari Raya open houses with Malay friends, sit at a Chinese New Year table with Chinese friends, and swap Deepavali sweets with Indian neighbours.

Live like that, and international thinking comes to children naturally. No one has to teach it; they learn by watching. They also stop being bound by grades and exam-score rankings. Here, nobody asks your exam score. The most the hawker asks is: “Can you take spicy?”

In No. 3, I wrote that I wanted to invest in non-cognitive education in Malaysia. Non-cognitive education means nurturing abilities that test scores cannot measure: curiosity, grit, the ability to work with others. Come to think of it, this country’s streets and festivals teach exactly that, quietly, every day. What I want to do is give that learning outside the classroom a little more shape. The details are still being prepared. I would like to let them mature a little longer.

For all my grand words, I am still going local myself. My Malay has stalled at greetings, thank-yous and prices. Half my conversation at a hawker stall is gestures. Still, the hawkers smile. Perhaps what going local needs is not language skill, but the courage to be laughed at.

An educational view

Given my line of work, here are three lessons.

First, think about the exit before the entrance. Will the children return to Japan, or head out into the world? Once the exit is decided, the choice of school and visa changes too.

Second, the visa decides how you live. Which visa you live on determines whether parents can work and whether the family can live together. That, in turn, sets the breadth of the parents’ social world, and the breadth of the children’s.

Third, take one step outside the circle. There is no need to leave the Japanese circle. Just keep one chair outside it as well.

Gaspard in Translation

In the film Lost in Translation, two Americans meet in Tokyo, a city whose language they do not speak. In the final scene, the man whispers something in the woman’s ear. The audience never hears it.

The most important thing about education migration to Malaysia is probably not in any English textbook either. English is a means, not the goal. Amid the noise of hawker stalls, the sounds of festivals and many languages, children learn to hear it for themselves. All parents can do is go out there with them.

One last preview. Education migration always comes with a money story. Not just school fees, but the mother and children’s home, two trips back to Japan a year, and in many families, the mother’s income dropping to zero. Where the father lives alone can change the total by tens of millions of yen over twelve years.

Soon, I will write about money over several instalments, with the father’s visa folded in. Whenever I sit down in front of visa forms and the household accounts, I get lost. Lost in Application, you might say.