Do the Otaku Have it Backwards?

While countless English speaking anime & manga otaku are struggling to learn Japanese, the Wall Street Journal reports that Japan’s largest online retailer, Rakuten, considers English the necessity of the future and has announced that the company and all of its 6,000 employees will be entirely English only by 2012. Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani predicts that the Japanese corporate world will have to adopt English in order to compete in the future global marketplace.