262 The Ne e ds to use Eng lish in Ja pa ne se Soc ie ty: A Sta tistic a l Exa mina tion of Polic ie s a nd Goa ls of Eng lish Educ a tion Terasawa, Takunori 1. Soc ia l ne e ds to use Eng lish in Ja pa n In the history of Japan’s postwar English education, social needs to use English have always been treated as a key issue for discussing policies and goals of English education. In 1947, when the new education system started, English, or more precisely “Foreign Language, 1 ” was introduced into junior high schools, which means that English became one component of the curriculum of compulsory education for the first time of the Japanese history. However, the first two versions of The Course of Study after WWII (Ministry of Education, 1947; 1951) did not necessarily assume that all students had strong needs to use English. Rather, they considered that English education should be an elective subject, not a compulsory one, since there was a considerable number of students who would not require the use of English in their future. Needs to use English were also the focus of well-publicized debates about English education. In the mid 1950s, Shuichi Kato, a well-known intellectual, had a debate on English education with other intellectuals, and he criticized the situation in which English education in junior high schools was about to become a de facto compulsory subject, and he proposed, instead, an intensive instruction of Japanese language and social studies especially to students who would not have opportunities to use English (Kato, 1955; 1956). Needs to use English were also a key concept in the Hiraizumi-Watanabe Debate in 1975 between Wataru Hiraizumi, a former politician of the Liberal Democratic Party, and Shoichi Watanabe, a famous intellectual (Hiraizumi & Watanabe, 1975). In the debate, both Hiraizumi and Watanabe, in spite of the fundamental difference in their views about English education, shared the same awareness that it was the only tiny minority who need to use English. In contrast to the two famous debates above, the English education policies recently proposed by the government has assumed that the use of English is relevant to the vast majority of Japanese (or even all citizens). For example, when the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals in the Twenty-First Century (2000) made a controversial proposition to make English the second official language in Japan. According to their statement, Japanese people in the twenty-first century should possess at least basic skills in English. Furthermore, in 2003, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) presented “an Action Plan to Cultivate ‘Japanese with English Abilities’,” which asserted, based on the awareness of “the progress of globalization,” that it was “important for all Japanese people to aim at achieving a level of English commensurate with average world standards” (MEXT, 2003:1; my emphasis). The same assumption lies in the current business discourse. A variety of business magazines and books (e.g., President Family, 2008; Moriyama, 2011) also point out increasing necessities of English 1 Although the subject called “Foreign Language” was introduced in 1947, almost all junior high schools chose English to teach. As a result, English became an almost universal component in the compulsory education in Japan. Terasawa, Takunori. (2014). The needs to use English in Japanese society: A statistical examination of policies and goals of English education. In Yoshijima, Shigeru (ed.). Foreign language Education V: Roles and Challenges in General Education (pp. 262-284). Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan-sha.