Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani on his Company’s ‘Englishnization’ [Live blog]

At the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, Rakuten (JSD:4755) CEO Hiroshi Mikitani gave a talk on the progress of his company’s ‘Englishnization’ program. Below are his comments, recorded as accurately as possible, but not quite verbatim.

#12:39: Usually I talk about the internet, but today I’d like to talk about our ‘englishnization’ program.

#12:44: From day our our vision was to become a number one global internet company. But as we moved on I felt we were missing something. We had to use translators to talk to employees for our foreign subsidiaries. And then I had an ah-ha moment that we everyone could speak English. But some thought it was too difficult, to hard to enforce. But one thing that pushed me to move forward, was our experience with our foeign employees in Japan. We hired foreign, Chinese or Indian employees, and they learned Japanese in three to six months sometimes, becoming very fluent. I thought, why can’t Japanese people do this. And I thought if we could communicate in English for a substantial amount of time then we could do it.

#12:48: The objective of the program is how to ensure our best practices can go worldwide, and how to bring our benchmarks world wide. […] Would would also like to hire global talents. 30 percent of our fresh graduate hires are foreign employees. Some from Japanese universities, some from overseas universities. […]

#12:53: Up until the middle of last year, we were pretty confident about this. Harvard Business School ran a case study about this, and the discussion was very hot — some students got emotional about it. So many employees are struggling, and are stresses. So felt we needed to help them. We provided classes, part of their official assignment — not for after work.

#12:54: In my ‘Englishnization’ book I wrote about the challenges we faced. It was not easy for me, not easy for my employees. They have worked very hard and overcome many challenges. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a trend. I’m going to donate the income of my book to Tohoku people, and I hope this book will be of some help to open up the eyes of Japanese business community and Japanese society.

#13:00: I’m surprised that many Japanese bureacrats are reluctant to speak English. […] I would encourage people to not be afraid to speak in front of others regardless of their English level.

#13:04: (On Chinese language) I’m learning Chinese, I’m struggling the tones are difficult. I think Chinese and English are fundamentally different. Chinese people are learning English too, their level is much higher than the [average] Japanese people. If Chinese later becomes the standard for English, then of course, we will need to switch.

#13:06: Before this project we had to select employees who could travel overseas. But we don’t need to do that anymore.

#13:07: Of course there are lots of problems (for Japan) but English is a critical problem. Some say we are the only competitor to Amazon […] but without English, it’s very difficult to compete on a global level.

#13:09: Lack of English communication skills really prevented us [Japan] from being a global leader, so we really need to wake up and open up our eyes.

#13:10: I would like to help Japanese schools and society, educate in English in a more useful way. If you calculate how many hours Japanese people spend currently [inaudable] it’s a huge issue, and its a big waste of time. I’d like to change the English education program to a more useful one.

#13:13: Regarding Pinterest, I just visited their office and sat with Ben Silverman and talked about my business. And they sort of share our vision for the internet. THey visited our office and met our staff. They got the impression that we are different, and that helped to get us aligned.