TOKYO --

Japan ranked 22nd of 54 countries in the second EF Education First (EF) English Proficiency Index (EPI), EF Education First Japan Ltd announced Friday at an event in Tokyo attended by leading figures from industry and academia.

According to the results, Japan recorded an EPI score of 55.14, below the average of 58.58 among OECD member countries. In the Asian region, Singapore and Malaysia scored the highest in 12th and 13th positions respectively, with South Korea in 21st place, Hong Kong in 25th, and China 36th.

This second edition of the index combined a unique set of data gathered from 1.7 million adults in 54 countries worldwide using free English tests over a period of three years, from 2009 to 2011. This is the first time the results have been disclosed and discussed in detail in a Japanese context.

The findings for Japan showed differences by region, gender and age group. Scores from Tokyo and the wider Kanto region exceeded those of other areas of the country, likely due to the greater concentration of international business operations and opportunities to use English.

The index also found that women in Japan scored slightly higher than men, while by age group, young people between 18-25 had the highest scores, with English proficiency then gradually declining for middle-aged and older people.

TOKYO — The colorful education minister of Japan, Makiko Tanaka, riled Japanese academia last autumn when she denied accreditation to three new schools on the grounds that “there are too many universities in Japan.”

She later took it back when her decision was met with fierce resistance. (And then she lost her job when the governing party lost a parliamentary election in December.)

But her comment left a lingering question: Japan’s youth population is declining, so why do new universities and departments keep popping up?

The number of 18-year-olds in Japan peaked in 1992 at 2.05 million, dwindling to about 1.2 million by 2012. During that time, the number of four-year universities grew to 783 from 523.

Even greater energy has been poured into thinking up new departments and majors.According to the Ministry of Education, there were 207 new departments, majors and graduate programs in 2011, and an additional 236 in 2012. In 2006, a whopping 482 new departments and majors were introduced...

Japan's New Advertising Trend: Japanese Girls Rent Their Thighs as Advertising Space

A good way to make sure your advertisement gets plenty of exposure is to place it where a lot of people are looking. With this important marketing rule in mind, one Japanese advertising service is offering brands a novel way to raise awareness to their business – placing advertising stickers on the bare thighs of young girls.

We’ve featured some pretty bizarre advertising techniques here, on Oddity Central. We’ve had people renting out their last names to the highest bidder, tattooing brand names on their faces, and even using animals as living billboards, But so far, women’s legs have been off limits. Well, not anymore; Japanese PR company Absolute Territory PR has begun paying young women to wear advertising stickers on their “absolute territory” – the part of their thighs between the edge of their miniskirts and their high socks. Apparently this area of the female thigh is very popular with Japanese men, as evidenced by the fact that it even has its own Facebook page. You’d think such a daring way of advertising would be frowned upon by most girls, but as of November of last year, over 1,300 girls had applied for the agency’s service, and their number is growing fast.

By James Riney

I usually write very positive things about Japan. I love Japan, it’s no secret.

But today I want to write about another side. I am not going to talk about the strong yen impairing exports, I’m not going to talk about politicians that don’t make decisions quickly enough, and I’m not going to talk about the aging population or the high suicide rate. If you follow Japan, you’ve probably heard enough about all these things.

I want to talk about a deeper problem that I have observed throughout my experiences living in both Japan and the United States. A problem that seems trivial at first, but with further analysis becomes a lot more clear. It has to do with Japanese studying abroad. Actually, it has to do with most Japanese NOT studying abroad.

The ARK Hills Sengokuyama Residence, in a new luxury high-rise in central Tokyo, was designed with an expat clientele in mind. Living rooms are larger than is common in Japan, in line with American and European tastes. The front-desk staff speaks both Japanese and English. On the ground level are upscale restaurants, a coffee shop, a mini-supermarket and a nursery school.

....
 Rents at Sengokuyama range from $2,900 a month for a one-bedroom to more than $27,000 for a five-bedroom, while units for sale start from $715,000 for a one-bedroom. The most expensive unit—a five-bedroom, three-bathroom suite measuring nearly 4,500 square feet—recently sold for $14.6 million.
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Tokyo's luxury-apartment market has been hit hard by the global downturn, credit crises and the rising yen. Rents in the section of Tokyo where Mori has many of its projects are down nearly 25% from early 2008, according to data compiled by real-estate brokerage Ken Corp.
....

There are three tools of pro-capitalist macroeconomic policy: fiscal, monetary and currency.  There is total confusion among mainstream economic advisers on which of these policy tools is best to use to get capitalism out of its depression.  Monetarists like Ben Bernanke are wedded to cutting interest rates and ‘printing’ piles of money.  Keynesians want go further: they want to reverse neo-liberal fiscal austerity measures and let the government spending ‘multiplier’ work its magic.  And some, less vocal, advocate the benefits of devaluing the currency to boost exports.  Well, the newly elected Japanese government has gone for all three ‘solutions’ at once!

Japanese economic growth has been stalling. The government’s answer is to add yet more fiscal stimulus to the economy, to pump in yet more liquidity and now to drive down the value of the yen against the currencies of its major trading rivals.   That’s particularly important for Japanese capitalism, which relies on exports and investment for any marginal improvement in growth.  In just two months, the yen has depreciated by as much as 20% against the dollar from its peak.  This was necessary, in the minds of the Japanese, because the yen had been left behind in a ‘race to the bottom’ for the major currencies since the Great Recession began.   At one point, the yen had appreciated in real terms (taking into account relative inflation rates) against the currencies of its trading rivals by 30-40% since the Great Recession started.  Over the same period, the UK pound had dropped 25% and the euro by 10-15%.  Even the currencies of faster-growing emerging capitalist economies had not moved up.

This is a convenient service to use when you need to find training venues (boardrooms and small meeting rooms) in Tokyo, Japan.

The website lists the boardroom capacities and dimensions for each venue.