/ (i.e., basic wage rate)
Bijinesu-ridashippu / business leadership
Waaku sbearingu; waaka jbea / work-sharing
Paafobmanju rebyuu / performance reviews
Kohporehto gabanaju / corporate governance
Diskaunto, biggu baagen / discounts, big bargains
The examples cited here may seem, to the native English speaker, to betray a certain lightheartedness, but they conceal a more serious reality. In the 1990s, the Western economies that had languished in the 1980s began to recover, and the Japanese economy slid into a recession that, as of 2003, has still not resolved fully (Jopson 4). Over the same period of time, increasing attention has been given to the fact that English has emerged as the dominant language of international commerce. Furthermore, English is not seen as a luxury but as a basic necessity of doing business.
Japanese business leaders have long attached importance to the English language as a feature of doing business, especially international business, competitively. Indeed, at the opening of the decade of the 1990s, when Japan was just beginning its long-term economic slide, the evidence of the marketplace was that Japanese corporate interests were intensely attracted to the output of English-language scientific and technical texts. In 1990, according to US Department of Commerce statistics cited by the American trade publication Publishers Weekly, Japan imported some $43.7 million worth of professional and scientific (PSP) books from the US, making Japan the third largest global customer for American PSP books in the world and accounting for 40% of all such imports in Japan (Taylor 43f). Obviously many of these books were translated; however, copublishing ventures between American entities such as Simon and Schuster and Japanese imprints accounted for some of the traffic. According to Taylor (44), the American books were often purchased by Japanese corporate R&D departments.
At this point, a difficult ana...