Which prefecture "invests" most in English, and where does Hokkaido rank? What the data says about English learning in schools and at home

Hello, everyone. I'm part of the study-abroad support team.

Today's primary-school pupils meet English far earlier than my generation did.

Under the current national curriculum guidelines (the Courses of Study), "foreign language activities" begin in years 3 and 4 of primary school, and in years 5 and 6 "foreign languages" becomes a proper subject.

Pupils learn to read and write as well as listen and speak, and they are graded on it.

For someone of my generation, that comes as a bit of a shock: "They study English that seriously from primary school?" The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) does indeed set it out this way, with foreign language activities in years 3 and 4 and foreign language as a subject in years 5 and 6.

That got me wondering.

Which prefecture in Japan puts the most effort into English?

Is it a region whose schools turn out strong English, one where people spend on conversation classes and the like, or one where adults keep studying long after school? And where does Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost main island and the home of our team, stand?

Looking further abroad, in South Korea and elsewhere, where English is also learned as a foreign language, how much do families invest in education?

So I took the question "How much time and money do Japanese people put into English?" and looked for answers in a handful of datasets.

First, the short version

Let me start with the most important point.

There is no official statistical ranking of "the prefectures that invest most in English".

That is because nobody tallies a single figure for "spending on English" that covers everything: public-sector efforts in school education, children's conversation classes, adults' online lessons, textbooks, apps, certification exams and study abroad.

So this time, we will look at:

• how much English pupils actually acquire at school
• how much households spend on language learning
• whether people keep learning English after leaving school

We will take these three angles in turn.

① Which prefectures are strongest in school English?

Let's begin with schools.

MEXT published its fiscal 2025 (Reiwa 7) Survey on the Implementation Status of English Education in June 2026. It reports the share of third-year students at public junior high schools (around age 14 to 15) who have obtained, or are thought to have, English ability equivalent to CEFR A1 or above (CEFR is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, and A1 is the lowest of its six levels). Ranked by prefecture, with the large designated cities tabulated separately, the top five are:

The national figure is 54.6%.

Fukui stands out: 84.6%, roughly 30 percentage points above the national average.

Note that this is not a ranking by education budget. It simply shows what level of English students reach, through school education and so on.

Even so, it is interesting to see how far the results differ from one region to another.

② And Hokkaido? A little below the national average

Now, Hokkaido.

In Hokkaido excluding Sapporo, 45.2% of third-year junior high students have English ability equivalent to CEFR A1 or above. Among the 47 prefectures, that works out at around 35th place, and it is about 9 points below the national figure of 54.6%.

If your reaction is "Hmm, that's not great for Hokkaido..."

then here is another number, and a very interesting one.

Sapporo is one of Japan's designated cities, which are tabulated separately from their prefectures, and Sapporo's figure is 56.2%.

That is above the national average of 54.6%.

Even within the same prefecture, then, the English environment and the results differ from place to place.

Doesn't that give those of us in Hokkaido a little food for thought?

It does not mean that people in Hokkaido cannot learn English.

If anything, it may mean that we should not let where we happen to live decide our learning environment, and should choose for ourselves how to get exposure to English.

Online conversation lessons will do. So will meeting people from other countries. So will a short trip abroad.

These days, you can narrow the gap that your address creates by your own efforts.

③ And how much do households spend on "language" lessons?

Next, let's look at household budgets.

The Family Income and Expenditure Survey, run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, has a category called "language lesson fees". It covers monthly fees paid for foreign-language conversation classes, such as English conversation.

Comparing annual spending by households of two or more people in prefectural capitals and equivalent cities in 2024, the top five are:

"Only ¥6,736 a year? That seems low," you might think.

You'd be right.

This is not an average for people who attend English classes. It covers all households, including those that pay nothing at all in language lesson fees.

The category also leaves out study-abroad costs, English apps, reference books, school tuition and so on.

And because it says "language", it can include foreign languages other than English.

So it does not mean that "households in Tokyo spend only ¥6,736 a year on English". It is best read as one rough indicator of what households spend on language classes.

④ Do Hokkaido households invest a lot in language learning, or a little?

The Family Income and Expenditure Survey is based on a sample of households. For an item such as language lesson fees, which only a limited number of households use, the figures can swing sharply from one year to the next.

In fact, the Statistics Bureau of Japan itself uses three-year averages for its regional rankings by item (the latest covers 2023 to 2025).

For that reason, I would not recommend concluding that Hokkaido's enthusiasm for education is high or low on the strength of this year's rank alone.

For reference, among prefectural capitals and equivalent cities, Sapporo ranked 31st in 2023, 40th in 2024 and 15th in 2025, which is a big swing from year to year. In the 2025 data, Utsunomiya came top and Tokyo's 23 wards came 9th.

So Hokkaido is neither a region that spends nothing on language education nor one that stands out nationally for investing in it. That, I think, is a reasonable reading for now.

⑤ An interesting finding: the prefectures that spend money and the prefectures with strong English are not the same

Let's recall the two rankings from earlier.

The top five for junior high English ability were Fukui, Tokyo, Mie, Gifu and Fukuoka. The top five for language lesson fees in 2024 were Tokyo's 23 wards, Yamagata, Tottori, Saitama and Nagoya.

Tokyo is the only place in both.

Of course, the two cover different people and use different survey methods, so they cannot be compared directly.

Even so, it is easy to imagine that the amount of money spent on English does not by itself decide how good someone's English is.

How much English is used at school. How much pupils talk with their teachers. How many hours the learner puts in. How often English turns up at home. Whether there are chances to actually speak with people from other countries. English grows little by little from all of these together.

Investing in English is not only about money.

⑥ Do adults keep studying English after school?

What about after people start work?

Data based on the 2021 Survey on Time Use and Leisure Activities show the share of people aged 15 and over who studied English as "learning, self-development and training". Nationally it is 11.3%. In Hokkaido, it is 8.7%.

So Hokkaido is slightly below the national figure.

Among 25- to 34-year-olds, however, the national figure is 14.2% and Hokkaido's is 13.3%.

The younger the age group, the larger the share who study English on their own.

What strikes me is that English is increasingly more than a subject you study only while you are a student.

Changing jobs. Travelling abroad. Working with people from other countries. Serving foreign visitors to Japan. Overseas postings. Gaining qualifications. And a simple wish to talk with people from abroad.

If anything, the reasons for needing English as an adult are multiplying.

⑦ What about South Korea next door? How much do families spend on English?

Now let's look at East Asia, where Japan sits.

South Korea is an easy country to compare with.

According to a survey by Statistics Korea and the Ministry of Education, private education spending on primary, middle and high school students in 2024 was ₩29.2 trillion (about US$22 billion) for the year. The share of students taking part in private education, the participation rate, was 80.0%.

Among the general school subjects, English had the highest private education spending per student: ₩141,000 a month (about US$107).

Counting only the students who actually take part in private education, English comes to ₩264,000 a month (about US$200), above mathematics and the highest of the general subjects.

That is quite a lot of money.

Still, we cannot say, "Korea spends ₩141,000 a month while Japan spends a few thousand yen a year, so Korea spends dozens of times more!"

Japan's Family Income and Expenditure Survey and Korea's private education expenditure survey differ in who is covered, how the figures are compiled, which services are included and which population is surveyed.

For this column, I could not find a reliable statistic that compares, on an internationally standardised basis, how much is invested in English alone per person per year across Asian countries.

Even so, the Korean figures can be read as showing that many families treat English as quite an important educational investment for the future.

⑧ So is Japan's challenge "spending more money on English"?

At this point you may be thinking, "Maybe Japan should spend more on English education too."

Of course, it makes sense to invest in good materials, good teachers, conversation lessons and online study.

But the data left me with a slightly different thought.

What matters may be less how much you pay than how much that money increases the time you spend actually using English.

Buying ¥10,000 (about US$64) worth of English study materials and leaving them on a shelf is one thing. Talking with someone from another country for 30 minutes every week, speaking aloud for 15 minutes every day, asking questions in English, and rephrasing when you haven't got your point across are another. Time like that can be the bigger investment.

Money, time and environment: English learning takes all three.

⑨ Think of it as "investing in your future self", and English looks a little different

Once you start work, there are plenty of things to spend money on. Meals. Clothes. Hobbies. Travel. Smartphones. Subscriptions. All of them enrich life.

But some of what you spend today is still with you five or ten years on.

Qualifications. Specialist knowledge. Skills. And language ability.

English you have learned does not stay at the same level for ever if you never study again.

Even so, losing your fear of speaking to people from abroad, becoming able to travel overseas on your own, being able to apply for jobs that require English, reading news from abroad for yourself: experiences and confidence like these widen your choices later in life.

So I think it may be worth thinking of money spent on English as something more than "lesson fees": money that adds to the paths your future self can choose from.

⑩ That said, spending big is not the point

This part matters a great deal.

You will not succeed in learning English simply by buying expensive materials. An expensive school does not guarantee that you will improve. Going abroad does not automatically make you fluent.

What matters is why you are learning English.

You may want to manage on holiday abroad. To talk with foreign customers. To change jobs. To raise your TOEIC score. To make friends overseas. To use English at work.

Depending on your goal, the place to put your money changes.

So there is no need to invest heavily from the start.

Start with one book. Start with online English conversation lessons. Start with 15 minutes a day.

Then, once you think "I'd like to talk more", you can move on to the next environment.

⑪ Which brings us to short-term study abroad as a concentrated investment

Seen as an investment in English, a short language-study stay abroad has one big feature.

It lets you change your time and your environment together in a short space of time.

When you live in Japan, you study English for an hour and then go straight back to a Japanese-speaking day.

At a language school abroad, English comes into your daily routine: getting up, greeting your teacher, going to class, eating lunch, chatting with friends from other countries, shopping, ordering in a restaurant.

Some language schools in Cebu, in the Philippines, can arrange a lot of one-to-one lessons.

A major feature is that you can intensively increase not only the time you spend listening to your teacher's English but also the time you spend speaking it yourself.

⑫ Can even one week count as an "investment"?

Some of you may be thinking, "If I'm going to the trouble of going abroad, isn't it pointless unless I go for about three months?"

It is true that the longer you study, the more time you spend with English.

But given people's varied circumstances, not everybody can study abroad for a long period.

So there is also the option of starting with a week or two of using English abroad.

The aim is not to perfect your English in a short time.

It is to find out "what I can't say yet", "whether I want to study more" and "whether talking with people from other countries is more fun than I expected".

Back home, your English study can change from "something I might use one day" to "next time, I want to say what I couldn't say then". That change alone, I think, is significant.

⑬ Precisely because we live in Hokkaido: the idea of "buying an environment"

Living in Hokkaido is different from living in Tokyo or Osaka.

You see more foreign visitors in central Sapporo these days, but there are still not many people who naturally use English for hours in their everyday lives.

That is why it makes sense to create for yourself an environment where you have to use English.

The fact that junior high students' English ability in Hokkaido excluding Sapporo is below the national average does not mean the future is already decided.

Sapporo is already above the national average.

And once you have left school, you can choose where, what and how much to learn.

That is one of the interesting things about learning English as an adult.

Summary | Investing in English is about future options, not the amount

The question for this column was: "Which prefecture puts the most effort and money into English learning?"

What I found was that on school English attainment, Fukui comes top among the prefectures, and on household language lesson fees, Tokyo's 23 wards came first in 2024 taken on its own.

As for Hokkaido, in school English Hokkaido outside Sapporo is below the national average, while Sapporo is above it.

In other words, the "strength" of English learning cannot be settled by a single ranking.

Not money alone. Not schooling alone. Not where you live alone.

What builds English ability, I think, is how much you learn, how much you use it, and how good an environment you build that lets you keep going.

Buying materials worth tens of thousands of yen is not the only kind of investment. Studying for 15 minutes a day is one too. So is saying a few words to someone from another country, or spending a week abroad.

All of it is an investment in your future self.

If you added just a little English to who you are today, what then? In five or ten years, what kind of people might you meet, where might you go, and what work might you be able to choose?

Learning English while imagining that future is rather enjoyable, I think.