Originally Posted by
yabadoo
My expectation is that in today's day and age with increasing globalization and interconnected societies and economies, that JAL would at least place particular importance to English language speaking skills and make sure staff were as near fluent as one can be to manage and solve issues on their own.
One thing I can think of besides the well known low English proficiency of Japanese people is that FA (or CA) is not as highly-regarded or highly-paid job as it used be, and English fluency is still not a commodity skill in Japan despite improvement. That with the improvement of job equality for women, I would guess those people with high English proficiency who would have chosen FA as a job in the past have better chances of landing on a better paid and less physical intensive job these days. Also there is a limit to how much of time and money airlines can spend on English training when they have to teach many other important skills and deploy fresh FAs to the field asap.
A bit of my story: I grew up in Japan and went through their English education through high school. I remember having to take an English course called oral communication B, which I now can say was a BS. The teacher had no speaking skill and just taught problem solving skills for college entrance exams. However, occasionally he would remember that the course was about oral communication and teach us how to pronounce some words. All I remember is that he repeatedly forced everyone to pronounce "map" as "myappu" . Maybe I was very unlucky, but I hope they teach better English these days.