Mariko Watanabe and Ingrid Piller celebrate their reunion at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

This post is also available in pdf-format. Click here.

In early July, YM Fashion’s CEO Mariko Watanabe flew in from Tokyo to Bangkok. She was scheduled to meet Ingrid Piller, who, on the way back from the Middle East to Australia, also just arrived in Bangkok to deliver a plenary speech at the H.I.S. Research and Industry Forum on Linguistic Diversity and Tourism in Amazing Thailand at Assumption University.

Mariko and Ingrid first met in Tokyo back in 2010 when YM Fashion Co., Ltd. became an official supporter of Language on the Move. Collaboration between the fashion industry and academics is unique, originating from the company’s increasing interest in the role of language and communication in their global business operation.

The day after the Forum, the CEO and the sociolinguist celebrated the success of the event in Chit Lom, one of Bangkok’s most fashionable neighbourhoods. Their conversation soon turned to YM Fashion’s first overseas venture in Thailand, which began some 26 years ago and was a trail-blazing endeavour in Japanese-Thai joint ventures.

In 2012, Thailand overtook the US for the first time and ranked second, after China, as the most desired destination for international joint ventures by Japanese companies (Japan External Trade Organization, 2013). At the time of Mariko’s first visit in the 1980s, however, the situation was quite different and only a handful of large-sized Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. Mariko says “Bangkok back then was a small touristy city without much of its skyscrapers, glamorous shopping centers and the Skytrains. During the rainy season, it once took us three days by taxi to get to the airport.”

Japanese Business on the Move

The survey points at an assumption that has long been present in the minds of the Japanese – to succeed overseas you need English. In the context of global business, the Japanese language is often considered as useless because, in the mentality of many Japanese companies, it is assumed to be only spoken by the Japanese in Japan. The trajectory of Mariko’s company in Thailand, however, is a story that not only challenges this myth but also highlights the importance of setting aside pre-conceptions about linguistic deficits and of embracing cultural and linguistic diversity.

Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

Mariko established YM Fashion in Tokyo in 1979 with her husband Isamu Watanabe and their long-time friend Yasuko Hayata. Ten years later, YM Fashion International Thailand was set up in 1990 with a young Thai partner. At the time of the launch of their business in Bangkok, none of the founders or their staff spoke English or Thai on a functional level. How did a Japanese medium-sized fashion retail company manage to find a local contact, secure a partnership, hire and train employees, and grow to operate a 7,000sqm factory with 400 employees and 10 retail shops in central Bangkok today? Mariko explains that the opportunity to expand YM Fashion and develop its trademark brand Yaccomaricard in Thailand originally came through an informal international network of hippies in the late 1980s. And their story in Thailand is a story of languages on the move, beginning with a business proposal from unlikely collaborators.

Hippie Connections

Back in the 1980s in Tokyo, two German internationalists, Guy and Helga Pachet, were producing European-style baby clothes at home. After a long trip around the world in the 60s and the 70s, the couple had settled in Tokyo where their first baby was born. As their home-made European children’s clothes gained popularity in their local area, they wanted to commercialise their production. They turned to their friend Mariko to explore collaborative business opportunities.

Mariko initially turned down their proposal. Communication was a problem. Guy spoke German, French and English but had very little Japanese at the time. Mariko and her staff couldn’t speak English, let alone German or French.

Mariko: “I didn’t think it would be possible to work together if they couldn’t speak Japanese. I asked him to learn Japanese first. I promised that, in the meantime, we would try to learn English. But he learned Japanese better and faster than I ever learned English [laughs].”

As Guy quickly taught himself Japanese, the couple and YM Fashion began collaborating, and soon their new brand, Annya and Besna, became a hit among fashion-conscious mothers in the upmarket town of Denenchofu, Tokyo. As sales increased, the need to secure a production site devoted to Annya and Besna emerged. The couple decided to turn to their old hippie connections in Bangkok, Thailand.

Passion for Success

From left: Mariko Watanabe, Helga and Guy Pachet, and Punsuri Revirava in Yawara, Bangkok, 1989

In 1989, the Pachets and Mariko flew to Bangkok to meet Punsuri Revirava, whom they knew from their travels during their hippie years. The three parties, the Pachets, YM Fashion and Punsuri, co-founded a company, Clair Moda. Punsuri, who is Chinese-Thai, provided a manufacturing site within her family-owned shop house and initially secured six seamstresses for the production. Mariko was responsible for teaching the six young Thai women how to sew and produce clothes that would satisfy the desires and tastes of highly discerning Japanese consumers. She recalls that in terms of language, training the Thai workers was not a problem.

Mariko: “I couldn’t speak Thai, and these girls are from rural areas in Thailand, so they could speak neither English nor Japanese. Basically I taught these girls everything by using Japanese and through body language. These women still work for us today, and 26 years on at our factory, they have become leaders and teach apprentices how to sew using Japanese technical terms.”

A year later, YM Fashion bought out Clair Moda in order to set up YM Fashion International Thailand. That was also when they invited a young Thai woman, Ichaya Khamala, to come on board as co-owner and CEO. Under Thai business law, a foreign company must have a Thai partner who maintains a significant share in the company. While majoring in Business Studies with a minor in Japanese at Thammasat University, Ichaya had worked as a part-time interpreter for Mariko in the previous year. 22-year-old Ichaya had limited work experience and no experience whatsoever in running a company. Mariko recalls that it was unheard of for a Japanese company to partner with a fresh university graduate, and a woman to boot. However, she had no hesitation:

Mariko: “What she had instead of experience was language proficiencies in Thai, Japanese and English and a passion for business success in her country on the verge of an economic boom. She had so much passion and desire to learn and grow with us.”

As their collaboration began, Mariko taught Ichaya everything she knew about production and business management, and for all these years, Japanese has remained the language of their transnational partnership. From the beginning, Mariko not only instructed Ichaya how to do business, but also helped her improve her spoken and written Japanese.

At the same time, all the YM Fashion employees who have been transferred from Japan to Thailand to oversee the production are required to undertake a three-month intensive course in Thai immediately upon their arrival. As Mariko explains: “How can Japanese managers win the heart of their Thai workers if they can’t speak Thai?”

Global Expansion and Family

The day before the Forum: Sei and Mariko Watanabe select outfits for Ingrid’s keynote speech at Yaccomaricard in Chit Lom

On her trip to Bangkok this time, Mariko was accompanied by her daughter, Sei Watanabe. Together with her younger brother Kari, Sei established YM Fashion UK in 1997 and managed the operation until her return to Japan in 2012. The siblings will take over YM Fashion in Japan in the near future as Mariko and Isamu ready themselves for retirement. As the mother of a young girl herself, Ingrid asked Mariko how she had managed to raise her children while building a successful fashion company and expanding overseas.

Mariko explained that she always took her children along on her business trips, letting them directly experience culture and language of other countries so that they would develop a deep appreciation for diversity. It was also important for Mariko and Isamu to raise their children multilingually:

Mariko: “After the war, we wanted to study English, but English education in Japan was really inadequate at that time. Early on in our overseas ventures, we did everything we could to succeed without English, but we always thought that our children must learn English AND other important languages to thrive even more in the 21^st century.”

Starting with English as a second language, their children went on to also learn French and Thai. While making sure their children learnt English is unsurprising, the insistence on French and Thai, too, is unusual. Mariko argues that French is the language of global fashion and continues to be important in international business negotiations and Thai is the language of their close partner and first overseas expansion.

Not only did Mariko work to instil an appreciation of cultural and linguistic diversity in her own children but she’s also committed to ensure that the children of production workers have similar opportunities. The nursery school that is located within the Thai production site, was established to cater for the young children of workers. The nursery teaches not only Thai but also English and the library provides children’s books in different languages.

Over her long career Mariko has remained a passionate internationalist: “We live in Japan, we live in Asia and we live in the world. Our perspective is global.” She never let herself be held back by the limited opportunities available to women of her generation: where she lacked language resources, she responded with flexibility by drawing on Japanese, her passion for fashion, her commitment to capacity building in Thailand and the common humanity that binds us all.

Carrying on the legacy of the pioneering founders, the next generation of YM Fashion – Sei, Kari and Ichaya – are equipped not only with many more language resources, but also an appreciation of linguistic and cultural diversity characteristic of the 21^st century business world in which they operate.

____

MARIKO WATANABE | Founder and CEO of YM Fashion Co., Ltd, Japan

Mariko Watanabe

Mariko was born in Hokkaido, Japan, in 1938. Having studied at the Kuwasawa Design Institute in 1957, Mariko worked as a freelance buyer, importing second-hand clothes to Japan, and later opened a vintage European clothes shop in Keio Limone Harajuku in 1975.

Mariko launched a new women’s brand, Yaccomaricard, with Yasuko Hayata and Isamu Watanabe in 1977 and established YM Fashion Co., Ltd. in 1979.

Having celebrated its 35^th anniversary in 2012, YM Fashion today has 24 direct shops and 120 wholesale shops in Japan, 11 direct shops in the UK and Thailand, and 42 wholesale shops in Europe and the US.

 

Ad for ‘English for travel’ classes ( www.gaba.co.jp/ad)

A few weeks ago, my family and I went to Jim Thompson’s special sales at BITEC in Bang Na, a short train ride from central Bangkok. The special shuttle bus waiting at the station for bargain hunters was full of Japanese JT fans, and I struck up a conversation with an elderly Japanese couple. As they looked ‘non-tourist’ and at ease with the surroundings, I first thought that they were retirees living in Thailand. It turned out that they were actually tourists, and the main aim of their trip was to stay at the newly-opened prestigious Okura Hotel. They were enjoying the hotel, but “we actually prefer the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. We stay there every time we come to Thailand”. Curious about “every time”, I asked how many times they’d visited. They looked unsure, replying “We’ve lost count…”. Finally, they figured that, since their first trip some 20 years ago, the husband, a retired real estate sales manager, had visited about 30 times, and his wife, a retired bank worker, over 40 times!

Seeing my disbelief, Mrs. Tanaka (pseudonym) enthusiastically explained how easy and pleasurable each of their visits had been. They quickly added that neither of them could speak English or Thai, but they have never had a serious problem or unpleasant experience. They love Thai culture and for Mrs. Tanaka, “Bangkok has become home”. Before we parted, they also talked about their wish to move to Thailand permanently, but that would happen, they explained, only after they had fully fulfilled their duty to farewell Mr. Tanaka’s elderly mother, who is 100 years old.

Although they claimed that they can’t speak any English, it’s probably the case that they can communicate in English to some extent. After all, they were able to get to the sales venue by themselves by using the BTS Skytrain where information signs are mostly in Thai and English. At the same time, their multiple trips to Thailand and their sense of belonging to the country despite their claimed lack of English or the local language, challenge the discourse of トラベル/旅行英会話 (English for Travel Purposes), a multimillion-dollar branch of the huge English teaching industry in Japan.

Compared to English for Academic Purposes, the king of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Travel Purposes (ETP) has received less scholarly attention. But ETP provides an amazing variety of courses and materials and has a strong hold on the psyche of many Japanese. What we find in cyberspace, for example, are countless numbers of ETP-related publications, websites of private language schools, vocational schools and universities that offer ETP courses, free and paid online lessons, seminars conducted by major travel agencies, websites run by travel English experts and enthusiasts, etc. Many 英会話学校 (English conversation schools) such as the three major schools, AEON, ECC and Gaba, offer ETP courses, and the discourse in the ads of these three schools is strikingly similar: ETP courses are for people who wish to make their overseas trip more enjoyable.

Gaba, for instance, recommends their ETP course for those who desire to (1) travel alone, (2) travel without guidebooks and (3) communicate with local people. Furthermore, ECC teacher Mika Fukube explains that ‘good English’ rather than ‘broken English’ will get tourists better service overseas:

海外旅行先でのホテルやレストランなどではブロークンな英語ではなく、しっかりとした英会話を話すことで、より良いサービスが提供されます.  (If you can communicate in proper English, not in broken English, you will be able to receive good service at hotels and restaurants in your destination.) [my translation]

Then, how much and how long does a tourist need to invest in getting that better, service-winning English? AEON offers a one-year ETP course and charges JPY118,440 for a weekly group lesson (plus the registration fee of JPY 30,000 and possibly extra for textbooks), while Gaba’s one-on-one course over 8 months is pricier with JPY437,850 for 60 lessons (plus JPY 18,900 for textbooks).

All in all, the ETP business in Japan thrives on promoting the idea of English as a magical tool to make overseas travel safer, more fun and meaningful.

The flip side of the discourse, however, works to instil a profound sense of anxiety and helplessness in prospective travellers as travelling overseas without English emerges as hard and dangerous, if not impossible. I’ve lost count of the Japanese people I’ve met, who shyly or anxiously claimed “I’m scared of going overseas because I can’t speak English.”

None of this linguistic burden, anxiety or any sense of exclusion was evident in my hour-long conversation with the Tanakas. They marveled at the land of smiles and all things Thai – its people, food and cultures – that are found alongside the wide variety of Japanese signs, products and services to which they can turn should the need arise.

Bangkok was recently named the world’s third top tourism destination for 2012, after London and Paris. Hedrick-Wong, MasterCard Worldwide’s global economic advisor, pointed out Bangkok’s “tolerant culture” as the winning aspect. In light of the Tanakas’ experience, Bangkok obviously offers more than ‘cultural tolerance’. It is a multilingual city where an elderly Japanese couple are able to enjoy their stay on their own, to have meaningful contact with the locals, and to be highly mobile, all without that so-called ‘service-winning proper’ English.

Indeed, the discourse of ETP makes little sense in the ‘real’ Bangkok as an overseas tourism destination; its linguistic landscape and multilingual service provisions help to make visitors welcome and demonstrate that in contemporary Asia you can get fantastic service without English.

Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok

I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, under the supervision of Kimie Takahashi. She has encouraged me to share my experience in developing this project here on Language on the Move. Funny enough, my research topic is often seen as ‘outside the box’ here, but it came quite naturally, so to speak, and here is why.

In 2010, I arrived in Bangkok as an international student from Taiwan, and since then I’ve been introduced to many fashionable gay hubs, such as the glamorous Telephone Bar or The Balcony on Silom Soi 4 or the always-packed DJ Station on Soi 2.  The city has always been well-known  internationally for its gay-friendliness and sexual diversity (Jackson, 2011), and indeed these places are packed with international couples, especially Asian and Western.

What struck me most about Bangkok’s international gay scene here is that these Asian gay men from non-English-speaking backgrounds, do not only speak good English but also seem very confident and skilful in socialising with Westerners: they so elegantly flirt, joke around and engage in intellectual conversations on the economy, education, globalisation and whatnot, all in English. They definitely don’t fit the image of Asians as deficient or shy speakers of English that is still paramount in the literature that I have been reading since I began my master’s degree in ELT. I’m pretty sure that they’d roll their eyes or be offended if I told them how Asians are talked about as such by researchers.

When I initially started developing an MA thesis project last year, I didn’t know that what I had observed in my daily life could be a research topic. Having read A Passion for English by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi (2006), I learned that research on the intersection of sexuality and desire in second language learning is actually cutting-edge I then decided to propose a project that would look into the language learning trajectory of gay Asian men in Bangkok, to explore if they were like the Japanese women in their study who developed akogare (desire) for the English language alongside their fantasy for Western masculinity.

Having decided to model my project on Ingrid’s and Kimie’s work, I looked for similar ELT studies with a focus on Asian gay men’s desire for English and the West. My pursuit was rather fruitless. Brian King (2008) explains that although the fields of ELT in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular have investigated learner motivation and learner identities since the 1980s, the literature has suffered from heteronormativity. Indeed, doing my literature review has made me wonder what kind of world previous research has been occupying for the last so many decades – certainly not the one occupied by millions of fellow gay and lesbian friends of mine living side by side with fellow heterosexual folks.

As such the fields of ELT and SLA have failed to address why gay learners aspire to learn English or how such aspirations manifest in their linguistic practices and learning or if being gay really matters at all. Similarly, the fields of Sexuality Studies or Sociology seem to have paid little attention to the language learning trajectories of gay Asian men who desire Western men. My study is thus designed t to fill this gap in the literature on Asian gay men’s desire for English and Western men, and how their desires may impact their opportunities to learn and use English in Bangkok.

As part of the requirements for my degree, I defended my proposal, a critical ethnography of Asian gay men’s desire and second language learning in Bangkok, to the proposal committee in April, 2012. One of the comments by an examiner was “This is an interesting project. It’s like thinking outside the box”. I was flattered, of course, as every new research has to be original and innovative. But, at the same time, the metaphor of the ‘box’ seems to index the very problem I’m going to challenge head-on, i.e., heteronormativity. For me, a gay man belonging to the thriving gay community in Bangkok and beyond, what I’m going to look into is pretty much inside the box.

References
Jackson, P. A. (2011). Queer Bangkok : Twenty-first-century markets, media, and rights. Aberdeen, Hong Kong; Chiang Mai, Thailand: Hong Kong Univ. Press; Silkworm Books.

King, B. (2008). “Being Gay Guy, That is the Advantage”: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (3-4), 230-252 DOI: 10.1080/15348450802237855

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59–83.

Billboard advertising the Japanese food fair at Isetan

I’ve never felt more welcome in a foreign city than where I am at the moment – Bangkok! It has to do with Thai people’s gorgeous smiles, but there is more to this city that makes me feel at home. It is Bangkok’s amazing multilingual landscape, including the pervasiveness of Japanese! Before I left Sydney, I had a vague idea of Bangkok’s linguistic diversity, and simply assumed that English would be the default foreign language of public signs as Thom Huebner’s research has shown.However, I never expected to find so many Japanese businesses, products and services that target Japanese people here. The signage of Bangkok is simply overflowing with Japanese!

It all started to make sense after I learned some interesting statistics. According to Japan Tourism Marketing Co., 886,783 Japanese tourists visited Thailand in 2010. In addition, there are more than 7,000 registered Japanese businesses and over 47,000 registered Japanese residents here (the largest Japanese population in Asia outside Japan). Japanese signs are pretty much everywhere, but they are particularly concentrated in three areas – Sukhumvit, where many Japanese expats live, Sala Daeng, one of the financial hubs with many Japanese companies’ offices, and Pathumwan where two major Japanese department stores, Isetan and Tokyu, are located.

Let me take you to some small streets off Sukhumvit Road in Phrom Phong. You are now walking past a large range of Japanese restaurants, Fuji Super, beauty salons, real estate agencies, Japanese flower shops, bakeries, cram schools, one-dollar shops, Shimako and Fuji hairdressers, second hand book stores, all predominantly catering for Japanese customers. Moving into Thaniya in Sala Daeng, you also find many Japanese restaurants, but what stands out in this financial area is the large number of hostess bars (different from Bangkok’s famous go-go bars, and similar to those you find in Japan), whose clientele are mainly Japanese business men, their clients from Japan and male tourists.

Up-market Japanese unagi restaurant in Phrom Phong

Having said that, none of these businesses have monolingual Japanese shop signs. Even though their main clientele is Japanese, their shop signs are usually multilingual in Japanese, English and Thai. Obviously English serves the purpose of creating an international image as well as attracting non-Japanese who are into Japanese products and services. By contrast, the inclusion of Thai in shop signs is a different story. Thailand has a ‘sign tax’, which is apparently quite complex even for business consultants here, but basically, you pay much less sign tax if your commercial signage includes Thai on top of other languages. As a result, many shop signs include Thai, even if the font size is relatively small. I assume that businesses such as the upmarket Japanese restaurant in the picture have a relatively small Thai clientele. At the same time, it seems the sign tax works well to maintain the presence of the Thai language in Bangkok’s increasingly multilingual landscape, against the increasing prevalence of other languages, particularly English and Japanese.

Snacks with Japanese brand names and catch phrases

It is not only in areas with many Japanese residents and tourists that you find Japanese signage and advertisements. Just like Dubai, Bangkok has seen a ‘Japan boom’ in recent years, and as such, the Japanese language is widely used to boost the image of various local businesses and products for Thai consumers and foreign residents. A good example of this is snacks. There is an amazing range of snacks and sweets with Japanese brand names and catch phrases, even though many of them are not produced by Japanese companies. These snacks can be found practically everywhere, including small local markets where Japanese customers are unlikely to shop.

In contrast to static shop signage, Japanese signs printed on packages are always on the move: they are constantly moving from factories to trucks to shops to customers’ hands to rubbish bins, powerfully integrating Japanese into Bangkok’s public space as well as hundreds of thousands of workplaces and private homes in Bangkok.

Reference

Huebner, T. (2006). Bangkok’s Linguistic Landscapes: Environmental Print, Codemixing and Language Change International Journal of Multilingualism, 3 (1), 31-51 DOI: 10.1080/14790710608668384

When I left the restaurant, I saw the same men smoking outside, while the women waited behind them. There were also two children, aged between 8 to 10, trying to sell bunches of roses to the smokers. Disturbed while enjoying his after-dinner cigarette, one of the men yelled at the children, “人生そんなに甘くないんだよ！ま、わかんねーか、ははは [Life is not that easy! Well, you don’t understand, do you? ha ha ha].” The children were showing no sign of discouragement. As I walked away glaring at the man, he was turning his back to the young flower sellers, as an indication of “No more communication and get lost.”

I don’t know what he meant to say with his comment of “you don’t understand!” Was he referring to the children’s ability to understand Japanese or the general harshness of life? (If the latter, he’s clearly completely wrong). Either way, I found his comment disturbing but also demonstrative of a common phenomenon associated with intercultural communication. In an intercultural context where people assume that their language is not understood, they can potentially say something very hurtful or immoral, that they would not have otherwise said. They believe they can get away with it because their meanings won’t be understood, and hence they won’t risk a negative assessment of their personality or potential retaliation. The absence of a shared ‘language’ and ‘culture’ in intercultural contexts then becomes some kind of license to insult, without consequence. This is a false assumption, of course. Receivers of hurtful comments do very often understand them through other channels of communication, be it body language, facial expression, and tone of voice, just as we can very often understand warmth and friendliness of individuals, with whom we do not share a common language. The man’s comment was a regrettable example of this assumption, embedded in the immorality of his laughter at the vulnerable and his lack of concern for small children working on the street close to midnight.

I am not suggesting he should have bought the flowers, as this is generally considered as a factor that keeps child labour an attractive option for helpless or abusive adults. But several questions come to mind: Would he have acted the same manner if the children were Japanese or in the company of someone with Japanese proficiency who could defend them? Did the other men remain silent because they thought the kids didn’t understand Japanese or did not want to spoil the fun night with the women? The children, however, perfectly got the message – they are not wanted and treated like dirt – even without any proficiency in Japanese. Some forms of communication work perfectly well in the absence of a shared language.