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What Kind of A Country Is Kazakhstan?
I unexpectedly visited Kazakhstan in order to observe the 8th Asian Winter Games in which ski orienteering became an official event for the first time. I’m embarrassed to say that until this came up, I hardly knew anything about Kazakhstan.
Located in Central Asia, Kazakhstan has giant countries like Russia and China as its neighbors. It is a country with the ninth largest land area in the world and a population of about 15 million people. Kazakhstan’s largest city is Almaty, with a population of about two million. Kazakh is the state language, although Russian is also widely used.
Unfortunately, there are no direct flights to Kazakhstan from Japan. However, they are friendly toward Japan and are very hospitable people.
I was surprised to learn that Kazakhstan has been maintaining steady economic growth at an annual average of 10% since the year 2000. Although the effects of the global recession caused by the financial crisis along with a slow-down in economic growth has been seen in recent years, Kazakhstan, with its abundance of mineral resources, is an appealing country to others, and various nations around the world are proactively providing technical assistance. Japan is one of them. (Japan is second only after the US in terms of the ODA provided.)
In the past, we constructed a website for Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Kazakhstan. Although I studied about Russia at the time, I now confess that I used busyness as an excuse and did not study enough about Kazakhstan (I doubt that was the case for the Arc Communications staff members involved in the project). Now that I have returned from Kazakhstan, I have been made to remember the basics, which is the obvious—that the production of a foreign-language website must start with getting to know well the country that the website is intended for.
Furthermore, while the global language is English, I reacknowledged that in worlds other than business, there are still many countries where languages other than English are still going strong.
In terms of Kazakhstan, English is not understood at all by the generation that grew up before the country’s founding (1991). In fact, German is understood far better than English. The Chinese, Mongolian and Korean staff, who spoke worse English than the Japanese, had no problems because they all spoke Russian. It was only us, the Japanese, who often found ourselves in situations where we could not communicate.
Seeing is believing. Although I have no intention of pretending that I understood the country through a single visit, when I heard that there is a decrease in overseas travel by Japanese youths these days, it made me feel that I wanted to make an opportunity to take young people, with the future ahead of them, out of Japan to visit other countries.
Of course, as the President & CEO of Arc Communications, a company that handles global businesses, it is more important that I make sure that I will not be left behind by the wave of globalization rather than worry about other people. I look forward to my son growing a little older quickly so that I can fly around to other countries (perhaps with my son?) more.
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Back Numbers
- What Kind of A Country Is Kazakhstan? (Spring Greeting 2011)
- Message from the President (Winter Greeting 2010)
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