There's been a push by Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese Amazon equivalent, for "Englishnization" (No, there's no mistake in the spelling. Mikitani came up with it, which itself seems to be a sign of impending failure)[0] - having all business within the company, even between Japanese people, conducted in English.
I don't have any inside info, but it seems that things have not been going well. Most employees still speak in Japanese on a day-to-day basis (except for in meetings), and they're studying just enough to get the score on the TOEIC that they need for their position at Rakuten.
I'm not as pessimistic as you are. It seems to me that making up a word with an illogical spelling is, from a linguistic perspective, the most quintessentially English thing you could do.
It's not the spelling that's the problem, it's the spoken word. I just said there's no mistake in the spelling so that people wouldn't think it's a typo that I made.
There's a difference between, say, spelling "tumbler" as "Tumblr" and coming up with a new word that sounds weird to native English-speaking ears. Apparently one of Mikitani's longtime native speaking employees, Kyle Yee, told him that it sounded weird, but Mikitani went ahead with it anyway[0]:
> "That word 'Englishnization' -- Mickey invented it," Yee says with a smile. "At first I wanted to say that the letter 'n' was a mistake. But Mickey said it was the word he chose as he wants everyone to always remember it. One day he'd like Oxford to put it into the dictionary.
This sort of insistence that they're right when it comes to English even though they're clearly not, seems to be a pattern, as it's also something I came across in a book about working in a Japan conglomerate[1]. The author, a native English speaker working at Mitsubishi, told his superiors that they had made some mistakes in an English-language document. Their response was to suggest that he had lived in Japan so long that he'd forgotten English!
There's been a push by Hiroshi Mikitani, co-founder and CEO of Rakuten, a Japanese Amazon equivalent, for "Englishnization" (No, there's no mistake in the spelling. Mikitani came up with it, which itself seems to be a sign of impending failure)[0] - having all business within the company, even between Japanese people, conducted in English.
I don't have any inside info, but it seems that things have not been going well. Most employees still speak in Japanese on a day-to-day basis (except for in meetings), and they're studying just enough to get the score on the TOEIC that they need for their position at Rakuten.
0: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ek20120730a1.html