Japanese-language education is at a turning point

COMMENTARY / Japan

Japanese-language education is at a turning point

The nation’s volunteer model gives way to professional teaching

The country is gradually transforming Japanese-language education from a volunteer-driven system into a professional, government-supported network to better serve its growing foreign population.? | Getty Images

By Midori Inagaki
Contributing writer

Jul 2, 2026

For decades, Japanese-language education in Japan was sustained not by the state but by the goodwill of volunteers.

A persistent belief that “any native speaker can teach Japanese,” combined with a cultural tendency to justify unpaid labor through a sense of personal fulfillment, kept the profession outside formal systems.

Sociologist Yuki Honda has described this mechanism as “yarigai-sakushu,” or the exploitation of purpose, a structure in which socially meaningful work is framed as something one should do out of passion, even without adequate compensation. In Japanese-language education, this meant that tasks requiring expertise in linguistics, pedagogy and second-language acquisition were long treated as hobby-like activities rather than professional labor.