English-language education in Japan

English-language education in Japan began as early as 1600 with the initial contacts between the Japanese and Europeans. The for-profit market has experienced a crisis of confidence in recent years following the bankruptcies of the major Nova. Almost all students graduating high school in Japan have had several years of English language education; however, most still do not have any command of spoken English.

The earliest record of the initial contact between the Japanese and a native English speaker took place around 1600 when it is believed that Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa Feudal Government, met with Englishman William Adams. Although it is reported that the only interpreter between the two men was only well-versed in the Portuguese language, it did not stop Tokugawa Ieyasu from having a very positive relation with William Adams who remained in Japan for the remainder of his life.

However, after the death of Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1616, a change in the foreign policy of the Bakufu ordered the closing of the English merchants' office in 1623, which consequently prompted the English to leave Japan. The English were refused permission to return in 1673. In 1808, the British ship Phaeton seized goods in Nagasaki and by 1825 the Bakufu ordered the feudal lords to repel all foreign ships, except the Dutch and Chinese.

The first translation of any English grammar book into Japanese was accomplished by Shibukawa Rokuzo, a high-ranking official of the Bakufu who had studied Dutch, in 1841 when he translated Murray's English Grammar from Dutch into Japanese. Then in 1848, American Ranald MacDonald came to Japan, after pretending to be shipwrecked, and taught English to fourteen official Japanese interpreters of Dutch in Nagasaki under Bakufu orders. It would be one of MacDonald's students named Moriyama who would act as interpreter between the United States and Japan in order to establish trade relations.

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