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From about the middle of my time in high school, I started reading English books in the original. My English wasn’t great, but I wanted to read the novels in the original, or books that hadn’t yet been translated into Japanese, so I bought a pile of English paperbacks from a used-book store down near Kobe harbor, the kind that basically sells them by the pound, and tore through them from cover to cover, whether I understood the meaning completely or not. At first it was more out of curiosity, but then reading in English started to feel more familiar, I suppose, and I could read through books in English pretty smoothly. There were a lot of foreigners living in Kobe then, and since it was a port city, there were always many sailors around, and the used-book stores had plenty of English books the sailors had sold to them. Most of the books I read then were mysteries or science fiction, the kind with gaudy covers, and the English wasn’t all that difficult. You wouldn’t expect a high-school student to be able to sink his teeth into the kind of complex prose of a James Joyce or a Henry James. At any rate, after a while I was able to read an entire book, from start to finish, in English. Curiosity is everything. Not that this led to improved grades in English exams at school—it didn’t at all. As always, my grades in English class remained pretty unspectacular.
Why is that? At the time I thought about it long and hard. There were lots of kids who had better grades on English tests than me, but as far as I could tell, none of them could read a book in English from cover to cover. Yet I could easily plow through an entire book. Then why were my grades in English class so mediocre? The conclusion I came to was that the goal of English classes in Japanese high schools was not to get students to use actual, living English.
Then what was the goal? There was only one: for students to get high marks on the English section of the college entrance exams. At least for the teachers in the public high school I attended, being able to read books in English or have ordinary conversations with foreigners was beside the point （I won’t go so far as to say superfluous）。 For them it was far more important for us to memorize as many English vocabulary words as we could, master the past perfect subjunctive, and learn to choose the correct prepositions and articles.
That kind of knowledge is, of course, important to have. Especially after I began professionally translating books, I’ve felt how tenuous my grasp is of that basic grammatical knowledge. But if you feel like it, you can always learn detailed technical knowledge later on. Learn it on an as-needed basis as you work. What’s more important is a clear sense of purpose as to why you are studying English （or any other foreign language）。 If that sense of purpose is vague, then the whole thing becomes pure drudgery. In my case, the goal was crystal clear. I simply wanted to read novels in English, in the original. That’s all it was.
Language is a living thing, as are human beings. When living people try to acquire a living language, flexibility is a must. Each side is in motion, and you have to find the most effective point of contact. This may seem obvious, but within the school system it wasn’t obvious at all. And I found this really unfortunate. In other words, the school system and the system that was me didn’t mesh well. As a result, I didn’t enjoy going to school. Though having a few good friends, and some cute girls, in the class did keep me going every day.
Of course I’m talking about back in my day. I think the situation has changed a lot since then. The world’s become much more globalized, the use of technology in schools has improved, and things have gotten much more convenient. But I can’t help feeling that the way schools operate, their basic approach, isn’t all that different from what it was fifty-some-odd years ago. When it comes to foreign languages, if you really want to learn a living foreign language, the only way is to go abroad. If you go to Europe, you’ll find most young people speak pretty fluent English, and they read a lot of books in English as well （which leads publishers of books translated into their various countries’ languages to lament the fact that sales aren’t so good）。 But most young Japanese are still not good at handling English outside of school—whether it be speaking, reading, or writing. And this is a major problem. If you leave this kind of distorted educational system in place, I don’t think even including English study starting at the elementary-school level, a fairly recent move in Japan, will help much. All it does is increase profits in the education industry.
This goes beyond English, or the study of foreign languages. I can’t help thinking that in almost every subject, Japan’s educational system fundamentally fails to consider how to motivate each individual to improve their potential. Even now the system seems intent on going by the book to cram in facts and teach test-taking techniques. And teachers and parents live and die by how many of their students and children get into various universities. It’s all kind of sad.