Rakuten's Englishnization makes English the language of a Japanese company

In March 2010, Rakuten founder and CEO Hiroshi Mikitani made one of the boldest cultural moves in Japanese business: he announced that English would replace Japanese as the company's official internal language, effective for all communication, verbal and written, by 2012. At the time Rakuten was Japan's largest e-commerce company, but its headquarters ran entirely in Japanese, which Mikitani saw as a barrier to the global growth he wanted.

The rationale was blunt. 'English is the only global language,' Mikitani told CNN. 'We're doing a global business. I think this is the only way a Japanese service organization can become a global organization.' Japanese-language signage in cafeterias and elevators was removed almost immediately, and by July 2012 all meetings, presentations, training, documents and emails had to be conducted in English. Mikitani set the example himself, holding performance reviews with his Japanese executives in English.

The company backed the mandate with resources: subsidized classes, study time, and staged TOEIC targets for staff. By May 2012 about half of Rakuten's Japanese employees could adequately engage in internal communication in English, and the average staff TOEIC score climbed from 526.2 in 2010 to 802.6 in April 2015 — levels considered advanced proficiency.

Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley studied the experiment and turned it into a teaching case. Her research also documented the human cost: two years into an English-only implementation, roughly 70% of employees at the company she studied reported frustration, and Neeley warned that without careful strategy, staff could lose the promotion paths they had spent careers building. The experiment nonetheless became proof for Rakuten's global ambitions: the same years brought the $900M acquisition of Viber and the $1B acquisition of Ebates.