Japan ’s role in the world economy, and the importance of learning Japanese
- A call for action
-
Indranil Nath, Ph.D
Managing Executive Officer, Sun Microsystems K.K.

Recent hype between the Indo-Japanese relations is note worthy with the Prime Ministers in past like Mori Yoshiro, Koizumi Junichiro, and today Shinzo Abe reinforcing the Japan-India ties with a new strategic orientation in a new Asian era. Japan and India share a global vision of peace, stability and shared prosperity, based on sustainable development. Shared democratic values and commitment to human rights, pluralism, open society, and the rule of law underpin the global partnership between the two countries. The global partnership between Japan and India reflects a broad convergence of their long-term political, economic and strategic interests, aspirations, objectives and concerns. Japan and India have viewed each other as partners that have responsibility for, and are capable of, responding to global and regional challenges in keeping with their global partnership. A strong, prosperous and dynamic India is, therefore, in the interest of Japan and vice versa. In the above context and in view of the current international situation, the two leaders decided to reinforce the strategic focus of the global partnership between Japan and India. However when it came to Information technology, even though more than seventy odd Indian software houses have set up their subsidiaries in Japan, the total value of India's global exports of software products and services is still insignificant to around eight percent. This is far low as compared to our next in the competition, China; whose global exports of software services is close to sixty four percent. Stepping up the exports of IT software products and services to Japan has been the fact that the Indian IT industry is geared up to meet largely the needs of the English-knowing engineers and multinational or Japanese clientele in Japan which is limited. Until recently not the non-English-knowing and Japanese customers except for few whom have invested in having their software engineers trained to Japanese language served the Japanese non-English speaking clientele.

Japan ’s role in the world economy, and the importance of Japanese language has become more evident. Unless the Indian IT industry develops its language capability in a significant measure, its export market will remain largely confined to the English-using world. China, which has been paying more attention to the needs of the non-English using world, is likely to steal a march over the Indian IT software industry.  I was at Dalian four years back and was surprised to see how a small northeastern city in China was gearing up to produce software engineering resources with Japanese language skills at large. No doubt the Chinese have been showing a remarkable thirst for learning the Japanese language. It is also estimated that the Chinese constitute nearly two-thirds of the foreign students studying in Japan. To my surprise, Japanese is the fastest growing language even in the United States higher education as compared to India where Japanese is still taught in few universities and not aiming to the software engineers. I would recall the days in late fifties when German and Russian was a growing language in education within the engineering community in India. So why is that not for Japanese, when there is a vast pool of opportunity in the region? So are we culturally different. Yes, we do but there is a lot of similarity both in culture and in our traditional business practice. Japanese and Indian language grammar is the same. Japanese is not a phonetic language and thus easy to learn as compared to Chinese or even grammar as compared to German or Russian. Reading and writing might be a challenge but spoken is easy for Indians like us who naturally speak three languages, English, Hindi and our mother tongue in general. Said that, I would encourage and call upon schools, institutions to teach Japanese Language as an elective in higher education to develop pool of resources that could target the vast opportunity and as a catalyst to strengthen both the relationship and business efforts between the two countries.

Said that, I will encourage all to join Japan Business Association Nihongo Academy (JBANA) and participate in action aimed to promote the Japanese language to Students, Professionals, and Corporate, and the understanding of cross-cultural significance, its important in the new era of Globalization and Economic Revolution between the two countries – Japan and India.

++