President Obama teaches English to Japanese
With titles like Yes, I Can With Obama: 40 Magical English Phrases From Presidential E-mails and Learn English Grammar From Obama, Japanese publishers have found a niche to sell instructional books for learning the English language. According to the New York Times, President Obama’s easy to understand voice, accent and vocabulary in his speeches and addresses have made him a natural target for English-learners in Japan, where he is already very famous.
Alluding to Japan’s highly indirect norms of communication, a Canadian speech writer living near Tokyo tells the New York Times that “Japan has not been serious about communication…In a Japanese company or political party or anyplace where Japanese come together as a group, the process is consensus-forming, and the outcome has to be consensus, and the consensus is internal. In that, the audience often gets forgotten.”
This is an extremely insightful view into Japanese culture. Loyalty to the community-at-large is a hallmark of Japanese society, where decision-making is up to the group, rather than the individual.
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Sean
