Summary
Japan’s English proficiency ranking dropped to 92nd out of 116 countries, the lowest ever recorded.
The decline is attributed to stagnant English proficiency among young people, particularly due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Netherlands ranked first, followed by European countries, while the Philippines and Malaysia ranked 22nd and 26th, respectively.
Seems like my gut was right, that it’s less because they’re regressing, and more because other countries have been increasing theirs.
I’ve heard it characterized that Japan has been in the early 2000s since the 80s. At first ahead, but now behind with less than expected development economically, societally, and in some ways technologically.
I’m just a foreigner and do not understand the culture well enough to be writing this comment, but reading “stagnant” didn’t surprise me much.
It’s a common statement, but I think it’s a bit too generalized. Japan is still bleeding-edge in some very niche areas, but a lot of technology in daily life is behind. A lot of stuff still requires going in person, phone calls, faxes, and a seal stamp to get done. I was able to do something through the bloated, awful eTax software today after hours of fighting with it yesterday (need to run several things as admin, install plugins as admin, have Japanese as the main browser language, and have Japanese locale of PC and it’s still cludgy and unreliable).