Challenges and Prospects for the EPA Programme: Implications for Japan’s Language Policy and the Discipline of Language Policy and Planning

Abstract

Chapter 7 discusses the near-term future landscape of Japan’s language policy. The first half of this chapter integrates insights from the policy discourse analysed throughout Chaps. 4, 5, and 6 with a brief analysis of the recent changes associated with the EPA programme to anticipate the future shape of the EPA programme in the coming years. The second half of this chapter presents the future research direction for the EPA programme as a language policy and discusses contributions of this research project to the LPP scholarship. It is argued that an emerging type of language policy like the EPA programme or so-called “tie-in language policy” prompts LPP researchers to re-examine the explicitness/implicitness of language policy components in given policy texts and that identifying language policy arbiters is a move toward a positive transformation of the LPP discipline as well as the society. This chapter ends with a summary of some pithy points in this book.