🌈 Sapporo English Conversation Newsletter 🌝

 

(この記事は、「ネイティヴ英語（ネイティブ英語）話者の数を調べてみると、札幌の国際化について興味深いことが見えてきました」の英語訳です。）

As a native English-speaking teacher living in Sapporo, on a daily basis I run into people from a wide range of professions—restaurant and bar owners, karaoke bar managers, chiropractors and physiotherapists, personal trainers and electricians, pastry chefs and bakers, home improvement specialists, sushi chefs, hostesses, nail artists, hair stylists, accountants, consultants, and many others. Of course, a lot of the people I meet ask me about how to phrase questions and answers in English for their customers, and they also ask me how to pronounce vocabulary that is difficult for Japanese people to say—words containing multiple ‘r’ or ‘l’ sounds seem to be the most challenging for them to pronounce.  

In the course of our conversations, we almost always find ourselves talking about the same thing:  that the number of native English speakers in Sapporo has been increasing month after month, year after year.  In fact, this phenomenon is so pervasive that I am pretty sure it is the subject of conversation with people working in most fields in Sapporo—including tourism and travel, hotels and private lodging and vacation rentals, real estate, the food and drink industry, medicine, transportation, universities and schools, fitness gyms, supermarkets, shopping malls, and offices of all kinds. 

Almost everyone has a story or two to tell about how the increase in native English speakers in Sapporo has affected them personally, either through direct interactions or through changes in their work in recent years.  Whether you are sitting in a cafe in Odori enjoying a latte, having a drink at a beer pub in Susukino, or simply trying to navigate through the crowds of people taking the Special Rapid Airport train from New Chitose Airport to Sapporo Station, it seems obvious that the number of people who are actually speaking in fluent English is getting bigger. 

Although it seems apparent that the number of native English speakers in Sapporo has been increasing, I wanted to take a look at the numbers just to see how much they have been changing. There are actually two aspects of this trend:  the number of native-English speakers who live in Sapporo and then the number who are travelers or temporary visitors just passing by to see the sights or visit friends.  In addition to counting those who come from countries where English is the primary language—the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland—one also wants to include native speakers who hold dual Japanese citizenship and citizens from other countries (like South Africa or Singapore) whose first language is English.  

Native English speakers who hold dual citizenship generally possess both Japanese and foreign passports from English-speaking countries. Japan does not legally permit dual citizenship for adults over 20, but a significant number of adults maintain both passports semi-permanently, and those under 20 hold dual nationality legally. When a dual citizen enters Japan, they are legally required to use their Japanese passport, but even without the requirement, they would almost always use their Japanese passport because it is much more convenient for them to do so when entering and leaving the country. Since these people are registered in the Sapporo municipal system as Japanese citizens under their Japanese name, they are not included in the monthly foreign resident statistics compiled by Sapporo. So in order to account for them, we have to apply a ‘hidden passport’ multiplier.  It seems reasonable to assume that for every 100 registered Western expatriates in a major Japanese city, there are roughly 5 to 10 dual nationals (most likely people from international families raised in Japan or ‘kikokushijo’ returnees from Anglophone countries) who speak English natively but only exist on paper as Japanese.

Then there is the number of near-native or highly fluent English speakers from countries other than the ‘Big 6’ Anglophone nations. Sapporo has a growing influx of international residents from countries where English is either an official language, the primary language of higher education, or spoken at a native level by significant segments of the population. If we want a more realistic count of people in Sapporo who operate at a native or near-native English level, we have to add estimated percentages from key populations in the Philippines, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Scandinavia and Western Europe. It turns out that in Sapporo there are around 1,850 residents from the ‘Big 6’ Anglophone countries, an estimated 130 native English speakers with dual citizenship, and 800 native-level speakers from non-Anglophone countries.  This gives us a total of around 2,800 native or near-native English speakers living long-term in Sapporo. 

Sapporo records over 14 million tourists annually, with inbound foreign overnight stays hovering around 2.5 to 2.7 million room nights per year.  Western Anglophone tourists account for roughly 6.5% of the total inbound footprint (with Asian tourism making up the vast majority). When we convert this into a daily average, there are roughly 2,300 native English-speaking tourists in Sapporo on any given day.  This means that there are just over 5,000 native or near-native English speakers in Sapporo at any given time.

I wanted to compare current and recent numbers with the numbers of native or near-native English speakers in the two years right before the COVID years reduced the tourist population.  While the visitor counts look flashy, the most permanent change has been in Sapporo’s estimated long-term native and near-native English-speaking population, which jumped from roughly 1,800 in 2019 to 2,800 today. Prior to COVID, the local resident population was largely centered around traditional native English language teachers, including ALTs and JETs, eikaiwa teachers, private language school networks, and international students and their spouses at Hokkaido University. Of course, these individuals remain an important part of Sapporo’s international community today.

Recently, however, there has been an increase in a slightly different type of person. A prime example is highly qualified professionals working in the IT and research fields.  The city of Sapporo has been investing heavily in the IT industry and promoting itself as an international research hub. In particular, research institutions centered around Hokkaido University and technology-related companies continue to recruit highly skilled talent from overseas.  Rapidus, for example, has been building an advanced semiconductor industry from scratch, and the combination of its massive factory site in Chitose and its partnership with Hokkaido University has required a rapid expansion of the regional workforce.

Consequently, there has been an increase in the number of engineers, researchers, managers, and other professionals with high English proficiency moving to Sapporo from key tech-partner regions, including the United States, Taiwan, and Western Europe, alongside highly skilled IT and research talent from countries such as India and the Philippines. Many of them use English as their daily working language.

Comparing the daily tourist load of 2019 (~2,100) to 2026 (~2,300) shows a modest but important upward shift. In 2019, Western tourism was growing rapidly but was highly dependent on short-term seasonal holiday packages. Today, while the raw number of flight arrivals has stabilized somewhat, the weak yen acts as a massive modifier; travelers from the US, the UK, and Australia are staying longer per trip than they did in 2019. Because the average length of stay has stretched, there are more individual tourists overlapping on any given Tuesday or Wednesday in the city, pushing the average daily “load” higher than pre-pandemic records.   

So how does this gradual and very visible increase in native and near-native English speakers in Sapporo compare to the number of non-English speakers from countries where English is not primarily spoken?  If we take a look at these countries, there are some interesting facts. The vast majority of non-Japanese residents in Sapporo come from neighboring East and Southeast Asian nations, and these are dominated in order by China, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Myanmar. But the order of the top five tourist countries visiting Sapporo is very different: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Singapore. South Korea and Taiwan dominate tourist rankings because both countries are incredibly close to Hokkaido, with frequent, cheap direct flights into Sapporo’s main gateway, New Chitose Airport. A flight from Seoul to Sapporo is between two and a half and three hours, making it an easy long-weekend trip. 

There is also the ‘snow’ factor. Taiwan and Hong Kong experience no natural snowfall. The chance to experience Sapporo’s legendary winter powder, the Sapporo Snow Festival, and winter onsen is a massive cultural draw.  There is also a notably low volume of Southeast Asian tourists. While countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Myanmar have thousands of young people moving to Sapporo long-term for work or technical training programs, the tourist volume from these countries is comparatively very low due to stricter tourist visa requirements and lower average disposable income for overseas holiday travel.  

You can really hear more English spoken by native and near-native English speakers on the streets and in the stores of Sapporo. But since the total number of residents and tourists from non-English speaking countries is increasing even faster than those from English-speaking countries, the actual percentage of English speakers within Sapporo’s total foreign population is slowly declining, from 12% in 2018 to around 10% in 2026. And yet the number of registered foreign residents has more than doubled in the last ten years, and the number of foreign visitors is steadily increasing. The number of international residents and visitors now makes up a larger part of the city’s total population footprint. While the city’s overall population is shrinking due to a low birthrate and an aging demographic, the international presence is moving in the exact opposite direction. 

As a native English-speaking teacher, I find that this trend is a positive sign of diversity. International residents and long-stay tourists are actively cushioning Sapporo’s economic and demographic decline and becoming a more visible thread in the city’s daily social fabric. The trend seems to be motivating more people to learn how to speak English well so that they can communicate directly and effectively with Sapporo’s international residents and daily visitors. 

Both new and older learners of English have immediate, tangible reasons to practice their listening, pronunciation, and speaking skills. The presence of more native and near-native English speakers means that both Japanese people and non-native English-speaking foreigners are having more chances and more places to interact with them and to improve their English skills. University students and adults are going to English schools or practicing their communication skills in private one-to-one lessons with native English-speaking teachers.  They are also fortunate to be able to engage with other native and near-native speakers in local cafes, community events and neighborhoods because organic, spontaneous interactions are happening naturally all around Sapporo. This means that English isn’t just a bridge between Westerners and Japanese residents; it’s the universal language connecting a Vietnamese technical trainee, an Indian IT specialist, a Taiwanese tourist, and the local Japanese business owners and workers that I mentioned at the beginning of this article. 

As an English teacher who gets to listen every day to my students talk about their daily lives here in Sapporo, I feel lucky and grateful to be right in the middle of this shift in a city that is actively becoming more global and open with each passing year.  I feel it is an incredibly exciting time to be teaching English in Sapporo.

 

 

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Sapporo English Conversation Newsletter

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