English Diary 2026
0903 At a time when messages such as Elon Musk's "academic credentials are meaningless" and stories about white collar workers losing their jobs while blue collar entrepreneurs become billionaires are so pervasive, I was actually more surprised by how strongly people in Japan still feel about academic pedigree. It made me realize just how deeply entrenched credentialism remains in Japanese society. In the English-learning world, some schools of thought, such as traditional sentence analysis and extensive reading, actually have one thing in common: it can be difficult for either camp to demonstrate its effectiveness through tangible and objectively verifiable results. By contrast, approaches geared specifically toward language qualifications can point to quantifiable outcomes such as test scores. Academic circles can likewise demonstrate their credentials through degrees, institutional affiliations, publications, and research. In that sense, the situation may be similar...