Kirk here with bad news about English education in Japan in general and Kumamoto…

Kirk here with bad news about English education in Japan in general and Kumamoto in particular. The graph you see here is from the following article and indicates that Japan’s rank among other nations in which English is not an official language has dropped precipitously:

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01509/

Within Japan, Kumamoto is in the bottom half of prefectures – ranked 33rd among 46 prefectures according to the government. Here’s that ranking:

Rank Prefecture Score 1 Fukui 59.6 2 Toyama 59.3 3 Shizuoka 54.4 4 Akita 53.7 5 Hyogo 53.1 6 Kanagawa 51.7 7 Nara 50.5 8 Tokyo 50.0 9 Fukuoka 49.7 10 Shimane 49.6 11 Kyoto 49.4 12 Tokushima 49.4 13 Iwate 49.0 14 Ishikawa 49.0 15 Yamanashi 48.9 16 Hiroshima 48.7 17 Okayama 48.5 18 Osaka 48.2 19 Ehime 48.2 20 Nagasaki 47.7 21 Aomori 46.9 22 Yamagata 46.9 23 Tochigi 46.9 24 Saga 46.8 25 Oita 46.5 26 Niigata 46.3 27 Tottori 45.8 28 Hokkaido 45.0 29 Gunma 44.3 30 Yamaguchi 44.1 31 Nagano 43.8 32 Wakayama 43.2 33 Kumamoto 43.2 34 Gifu 42.5 35 Okinawa 42.3 36 Chiba 42.0 37 Saitama 41.8 38 Mie 41.8 39 Miyagi 41.2 40 Kagawa 40.8 41 Kochi 40.3 42 Aichi 40.0 43 Miyazaki 38.7 44 Ibaraki 38.3 45 Kagoshima 37.1 46 Fukushima 36.3

I translated the data from a 2021 government survey published here:

https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/kokusai/gaikokugo/1415043_00001.htm

Then I rearranged it in descending order by overall score (the original data isn’t ranked).

The overall scores seem to be based largely on the number of pupils thought to be at or above the CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) A2 level.

So, if you’ve found teaching and/or communicating in English here to be hard, it’s not just you. ;)