1 The Role of Japanese Language Education in the Asian Century * Yuko Kinoshita, Australian National University Yuko.Kinoshita@anu.edu.au Abstract Foreign language education in Australia is going through an interesting time. The arrival of “the Asian Century” has posed the question “is Australia ready for it?”, and this has drawn much attention to education in Asian languages and cultural literacy. Although many university language programs still struggle under constant financial pressure, we are observing increased political and public interest in Asian language education. In this context, I believe that it is the time for us to stop and think about the future shape of Japanese language education. This paper examines the current environment around us and explores the potential role of Japanese language educators in Asian Century Australia. Keywords Japanese language, the Asian century, foreign language education 1. Introduction Japanese language education in Australia has a long history, going back for a century (Shimazu, 2004). Japanese has a reputation as a difficult language to learn, and has no substantial community of speakers outside its home country - unlike, say, Chinese or French. Yet it has been enjoying great popularity for some decades. In 1998, Australia was the second greatest home for Japanese language learners in the world after Korea (The Japan Foundation, 1998). While now overtaken by China and Indonesia, Australia still holds the fourth greatest number of Japanese language learners in the world. Although the overall number of learners has declined somewhat over the last decade (de Kretser & Spence-Brown 2010), the preliminary results of a 2012 survey report that 296,672 Australians are formally studying Japanese, recovering by 7.6% from the great decline observed in 2009 (The Japan Foundation, 2003), (The Japan Foundation, 2009, 2013). About 64% of existing Japanese language teachers in Australia are not native speakers of Japanese (The Japan Foundation, 2009). While China, Korea, and Taiwan have higher ratios of non-native teachers than Australia (84%, 84% and 80% respectively), this is a considerably higher ratio compared to any other non-Asian countries such as United States (22.1%), United Kingdom (24%), Canada (24%), or France (22%). This strong representation of non-native * This paper was presented to the 18th Biennial Conference of the Japanese Studies Association of Australia at the Australian National University from 8th to 11th July 2013 and has been peer-reviewed and appears on the Conference Proceedings website by permission of the author who retains copyright. The paper may be downloaded for fair use under the Copyright Act (1954), its later amendments and other relevant legislation.