Cross-cultural communication （79）　

79) Filipinos and English
As of 2018, my workplace is a nursing home in Minato Ward where I work as a managing doctor four times a week, and a clinic in Nishi-Nari Ward where I work part-time once a week. In both of these workplaces, there are Filipino employees. At the nursing home, there is a male Filipino caregiver, and at one of the facilities visited for home care at the Nishi-Nari clinic, there is a female Filipino helper. There are many nursing care facilities in Nishi-Nari ward, so Filipino helpers are not uncommon. Filipinos who work in Japan can speak Japanese to a degree that doesn't interfere with their work, but after their native language, English is by far the most convenient language for them. So these two Filipinos are very happy when I speak to them in English.

Once, I asked a Filipino woman helper in Nishi-Nari about the current state of English in the Philippines. Based on my impressions of Filipinos I met as a doctor or nurse during my residency in New York in 1980s, and Filipinos I saw as patients in Japan, I thought that unless a Filipino had received at least high school education, they would not be able to speak English very well. However, the fact that she speaks English with a slight accent but almost perfect grammar shows that even elementary school children in the Philippines today can understand and speak a reasonable level of English. According to an online survey, the Philippines has the third largest population of people who can use English for work purposes in the world. Using this English, Filipinos are working abroad all over the world. As evidence, the amount of money sent home by Filipinos working abroad accounts for 10% of the national budget of the Philippines! As we can see, in this global society, international communication skills clearly have an impact on the national economy.

As I wrote in a previous article in this series, there is no need to start language education from an early age and aim to become bilingual. However, the English education that has been carried out since junior high school should be improved, and at least half of the Japanese people who have a certain level of intellectual ability should be able to communicate in English to some extent.

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