Japan - US Business News

Language teaching that Inspires as well as Instructs

I was speaking with my sister a while back who is currently living and teaching in Japan. First it was me and then she went to Japan. It’s a family thing I guess, our love of that country.

Anyway, she was on the hunt for better English teaching materials for her classes. The text the school was using had its good points but was not very well liked by the students, nor the teachers. 

 This got me thinking. This has been the story in teaching English in Japan for a long time now. It was true when I was there and taught at schools like Nova (now defunct) and at a college and it seems to still be true.

English Language education in Japan is such a huge market yet most of the teaching material is unoriginal, boring, not very inspiring or user friendly.  Why are business men and  junior high school student using the same textbook?

Entrepreneurship

A couple of years ago I was approached by a professor from Georgia State University. He was taking his "Entrepreneurship" graduate class to Japan to study entrepreneurship and wanted to know if I would be interested in speaking to his class in Japan. Unfortunately for me, I was based in New York. But I was still very interested and supportive of this class trip.

They blogged about their trip and meetings with different Japanese organizations and businesses. I thought that there needed to be more trips of this type.

This professor, Jim Beach, continues his Entrepreneurship teachings and has now taken it to a new level.

He is currently delivering a series of entrepreneurship lectures – covering all aspects of starting a business, getting an idea, creativity, funding, bootstrapping, finding a supplier, and getting a website to #1 on Google.

The main thesis of the lectures is low risk entrepreneurship: starting a business while you still have a job so you keep your insurance and NOT putting a double mortgage on the house.  Start small and risk less, build for 3-4 years, and then quit your job, when the business is doing $300,000 - 400,000. He speaks about Importing, Exporting, using India for web programming to cut cost and of course Trade rules.

He and an associate have created the The Entrepreneur School Online, the most comprehensive school for business start-up. "How to start a new business?" This entrepreneur center will answer all your questions and provide a step by step guide to starting a new business.

"Kotoba no Mondai" no more

There is a term in Technology consulting that is used when bugs or glitches in a software program disrupts its function and we have to come up with a temporary solution until we can permanently fix the problem. We call it a "work around". Something that can be implemented quickly until a permanent solution can be created. This of course can apply to any field and of course life in general.

I was having lunch with some Japanese friends over the weekend and we were talking about what stops a lot of Japanese initiatives when it comes to the U.S. or when trying to promote Japan as tourist destination for Americans.

They mentioned "Kotoba no mondai" which essentially means language problem or language barrier.

Yes I said, I understand, I have heard it many a time in the course of my work. But should that be the end of it? Is that something that we should let stop us? I asked them to think of " Kotoba no mondai" as the starting point instead of a stopping point.

How, they asked? Well, I said, figure out where to go from that point and see what is possible. What 'work around' can be created? After all it is not just Japanese language that is a barrier to Americans. They still go to Europe in record number and encounter many different languages there. So why should Japan be different?

I threw out some basic ideas off the top of my head on how to get more American tourists into Japan. As I rattled these ideas off, I saw the light dawn in their eyes.

 It is often just a new way of looking at something that sparks a solution or "work around". They realized that if they didn't let "Kotoba no mondai" stop them, they could create a way around it.