What If Japanese Can't Speak Japanese in Japan?

A queer body "Cool Japan Movement Promotion Council" proposed last August to create a special zone where English is made the official language, mark you, in Japan.

Takeshi Sato, a writer/critic who contributes to the New Nihon Keizai Shimbun of Takaaki Mitsuhashi, quite correctly rebuffs the proposal in Money Voice. So, an episode is due for "our" common notion on the absurdity of the proposal itself and in the broader sense how a nation's language life ought to be.

Sato points out in the outset of his rebuff:

"Now, it's not the question of making both Japanese and English official, but just English to be made Japan's official tongue within the said special zone, whatever that is.

"If one goes this far and extreme, there won't be any possibility, danger that is, of the proposal ever winning public support.

Right, indeed. Mr. Sato is absolutely right in labeling the idea of officializing an alien language at the expense of your own mother tongue is a sheer manifestation of the deepest of complexes on the part of those who proposed the idea.

Mr. Sato is now recuperating from a traffic injury last September. He thought for a moment one day of him being in that special zone, in a hospital where all communications are banned except via English. He says:

"What if I must tell my doctor how I feel, what's bothering me, what I want him to do for me and why, and all that. My doctor will advise me what to do, why and how. How could I manage all that in English? Absurd".

Absurd, indeed.

No point in exploring this subject any further. Globalization, fine. Internationalization, good enough, but the argument is like putting the cart before the horse. Your mother tongue is your own soul itself, prerequisite to all your behaviors, and discarding it means cutting the very branch of tree you sit on.