Yep. Every Japanese takes six years of English during middle school and high school. Of course, Japan being mainly a homogeneous society where English language use is hardly ever used in society, a vast majority of them do not retain English. Furthermore, most of the emphasis on English is learning/memorizing vocabulary and grammatical writing, but not in spoken context. And the only use of English during those six years is for only that subject course in middle school and high school. When you put it like that, "learning English and using it" is a very small fraction of everyday Japanese life. Every other subject from math to history to science, to everyday shopping and commuting, watching TV and surfing online is all done in Japanese. English doesn't get retained when 99.999% of everyday Japanese life by an average Japanese person can be done solely with Japanese.

Only those who have an interest in them or want to study abroad, or sent to an English speaking country as an expat take English seriously. In sharp contrast, here in LA, studying Spanish does have some positives because you actually could use it and practice it in the real world.

It's kinda like trigonometry and calculus over here. You study it, memorize it, and pass the AP exam so you don't have to take some of the mandatory courses in your freshman year in college, but once out in the real world working in an office environment, you never really have a need to use sin/cos/tan and derivatives and you end up forgetting them.

Being able to speak a different language comes with repetition. A merchant or a clerk will be able to speak English "perfectly" because the vast majority of the English they've been using is repetitive. And what is repetitive in sales? "Yes, that's looks good on you," "try this," "this is a bargain," "Yes," "Thank you," "You're very welcome," etc. etc. etc. You repeat this hundreds of times for every English language speaking customer, anyone can say it in "perfect English." However, once you throw out something like credit card processing mumbo jumbo which I hardly expect minimum wage earning cashiers to know about let alone that's not in their repetitive dictionary in their head, they will blank out.

It's the same in any language sales. I go to Mexico, Turkey, or Thailand, and when the shop sellers look at me, they recognize me as a Japanese person and they immediately start speaking in "perfect" Japanese. "kore yasui yo!" "shachou-san! mite! mite!" "totemo niauyo!" etc. etc. Do I expect them to strike a full conversation with them in Japanese with regards to Mexican, Turkish, or Thai politics? No.

Don't get me wrong, there are many people in the world that can speak English very well. I've had a nice chat with a Jordanian taxi driver in Jordan who took me to the Dead Sea while I was there who spoke perfectly good English as he used to be a limo driver in NYC for 7 years. I've had an inn keeper in Kagoshima speak perfectly good English and Spanish as he spent his first 20 years living in Alberta and Peru as his father worked for a Japanese company with an office in Calgary and Lima.

But a vast majority of the people rarely do get to use English repetitively in their everyday lives. Learning a second language, isn't necessarily the same as understanding and being able to effectively communicate in that second language either. That, usually comes with repetition. Otherwise, it just gets put in waaaaay back in the head and sits somewhere in your head collecting dust.

Someone like me, who was born to Japanese parents in the US and have many Hispanic friends growing up in LA, would most likely grow up being a trilingual far better than the same Japanese person in Japan of my age, who had spent six years learning English in middle and high school, and yet having zero use of the English language in a homogeneous Japanese society.