The Language of Global Success

In May 2010, Hiroshi Mikitani, the billionaire founder and president of Rakuten, Japan's largest e-commerce platform, gathered all his employees for a startling announcement. From that day forward, the company's official corporate language would be English, eliminating Japanese from board meetings, sales presentations, internal computer systems, and even the menus at its corporate cafeteria in Tokyo. More than seven thousand employees were given a firm, nonnegotiable deadline of two years to achieve high scores on international language proficiency tests.

The penalty for anyone who failed to reach the required score was unforgiving: demotion, a substantial bonus cut, or even immediate dismissal. This bold and controversial experiment, dubbed englishnization by the founder himself, became a laboratory for Harvard researcher Tsedal Neeley. Over five intense years, she closely followed the human and organizational realities behind this dramatic transition.

Why would a profitable, market-leading Japanese company risk disrupting its own operations to switch languages? Neeley explains that Mikitani saw Japan's population decline and shrinking consumer market as a death sentence for companies operating exclusively at home. To survive over the long term against giant competitors like Amazon, Rakuten needed to become a genuine multinational, capable of managing acquisitions in Europe, the United States, and the rest of Asia.

For a company with offices across several continents, adopting a shared lingua franca is a basic operational necessity, not a cosmetic whim. When engineers in Japan, marketing professionals in France, and executives in Brazil try to collaborate without a common vocabulary, information gets trapped in local silos and strategic decisions take months. English served as the neutral infrastructure that would allow data and knowledge to circulate freely.

As she observed everyday office life, Neeley identified a sociological phenomenon she called the dual divide. This deep rupture separated Japanese headquarters from international subsidiaries on two simultaneous fronts: the language barrier and the cultural and emotional distance from headquarters. Rather than immediately unifying the corporation, imposing the new language exposed tensions and quiet resentments that had been hidden beneath the corporate surface.

Japanese employees, who had always enjoyed the prestige of working at headquarters, where decisions were made, suddenly felt vulnerable and voiceless. Meanwhile, employees at overseas subsidiaries, who spoke the official language but felt excluded from senior leadership's strategic conversations, began demanding a more prominent role. This dynamic created distrust and friction among colleagues in far-flung departments.