All Japanese People Can Speak English Real Good
Did you take a foreign language in high school? How much do you remember of it? Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure, Japanese students take many years of English while they are in school, but from my experience they mainly focus on writing rather than speaking and the only ones who are really good at it are those who really take an interest in the language and study it outside of class.
Many Japanese students just do enough to get by in English class and by the time they graduate they've forgotten quite a bit of it. This, coupled with the fact that the average Japanese person has little to no use for English on a daily basis, causes the English skills of many Japanese people to be pretty elementary. So next time you visit Japan, don't be surprised if not absolutely everyone speaks English as well as you'd like them to.
