Spoken like someone who has never set foot in Japan. I have. This is completely false.
The majority of Japanese in their forties or older do not speak or understand a word of English. For those who are younger... There is so little use for it in everyday life in Japan that few people rarely remember much other than basic greetings and such from their required classes in English during school, or words that have made their way into Japanese pop culture. It's just like second languages taught in American schools. You may have a vocabulary of a hundred or so words by the time you move on to the next grade, and understand the basics of grammar, but you are not even close to fluent, and don't generally understand the language as it is spoken or written, and soon forget much of what you learned. During my two years in Japan, I met maybe three people total that could speak and understand English well enough to carry a conversation with me, and two of them were people who were in special programs in college learning to be translators, because English translators are in somewhat high demand for international companies that deal with the USA, and the third grew up near the US military base, and spent his time as a child talking to the American soldiers and doing his best to learn the language from them. Everyone else had to suffer through my horribly American accented Japanese, and shake their heads at the baka-gaijin who talks funny. I admit, it has been a good ten years since I lived there, but I doubt much has changed since then in this regard. Even my wife, who I brought home with me, and who prided herself on how well she did in her English classes in school could barely speak a word of it before she moved to the USA and really got immersed in the language. English is not the universal language that many English speakers believe it to be. A lot of people in countries that do not speak English as their official language really have no use for learning it, and so don't really care. Japan is no different in my experience. Learning a language is not something most people can do in a classroom, they have to immerse themselves in it through various means to really start picking it up properly. My wife, for example, started dating me because she wanted to learn to speak English better, and her teachers told her the best way was to find an English speaking boyfriend. And let me tell you, that was a VERY odd and awkward pick up, with her trying to come onto me in broken English, and using most words incorrectly before I finally asked her if she would be more comfortable having the conversation in Japanese. You can spend years and years in a classroom studying a language and still not be able to understand it when spoken.
