Improve English Competence to Develop Literacy

~Most Japanese People don’t Access the Information Shared in English~

          When you come to Japan from a foreign country as a tourist, you may realize that there are not so many Japanese people who speak to you in English. Japanese people don’t use English in everyday life, not only as a means of communication but also as a means of getting information.

A Few Days Time Lag
          Since last February, I realized something while I have been reading a lot of articles related to COVID 19 and SARS-Cov-2: There is a time lag of two or three days at least between when English articles are covered in the main stream media of English such as BBC, CNN, and so on, and when the equivalences are translated to Japanese and mentioned in the Japanese main stream media. 
          I remember reading an English article that the loss of taste and smell is one of the crucial symptoms of COVID 19 last March. Three days after that the same information started being referred to in Japanese news papers’ headlines.

Pick-and-Choose Information of JMSM
          There is another problem of Japanese main stream media: They pick and choose the information and the contents to suit their own convenience or the administration’s situations while most of the Japanese people don’t doubt the media’s trustworthiness and access the primary sources of the information that are shared in English. They even distort, trim or ignore the facts. They occasionally don’t let us know on purpose: the Japanese media reported last February that South Korea failed to deal with COVID 19 because they did too many tests and the patients were overwhelmed by the medical capacity. But that was not true.
          People of South Korea tried as many tests as they could do, traced the transmitting routes, found the infected persons and isolated them. They actually succeeded to lower the curve of the graph. You can learn from the articles and reports covered on the Internet or MSM in English that the other countries evaluated the South Korea’s responses to the pandemic to some degree.

97% of the Japanese People don’t Access First Hand Information in English
          There are a lot of people who think still now that Japan should not do so many PCR tests but the World Health Organization and other researching institutes say to test, find as many asymptomatic patients as possible, diagnose them, isolate them, and give the medical treatment to them as early as possible. That’s the only way to deal with the pandemic. I am surprised at the fact that even some medical practitioners deny the PCR test. The number of the tests per day is still about 60,000 in Japan now. The PCR test denial theory is circulating only in Japan.
          I think that one of the causes that such an argument is still keeping on is that there are only three percent of the Japanese people who can trace to the first hand information that is mostly written in English. The more Japanese people are able to use English on the Internet, the more diverse information they can get.

Japanese people need to acquire English as the Crucial Tool
          Japanese people learn English as a studying subject at school. They just remember the words, phrases, sentences, the rules of composition, colocations, and so on for the TESTs. They don’t have any opportunities and incentive to use English in everyday life or just for fun. Then they FORGET before they acquire it.
          I think that they need English more when they want to know what is happening in the rest of the world because Japanese main stream media don’t provide reliable information sometimes.
         I think that Japanese learners have to do something other than as a school subject: You have some activities that you really love to do and do them in English. For example, if you love dancing, you make a dancing video and you explain it in English. If you like Japanese castles, you write reports about your favorite castles in English. Then you upload it on the internet platform such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. Then you build up your own world with people you reach out to.
          You can also learn almost everything online. You can take a degree from a university in a foreign country. Japanese people have to change their perspectives about education and learning. Improving your English with self-education will bring you higher literacy.