Gloabalization on teaching

Kubota's article talks about Japan and its kokusaiaka policy of education in the globalization era.  Like any policy, this has been developed over the history of Japan and has its problems as well as benefits.  The nationalist view that it promotes an essentialist Japan and not the multicultural country that it is.  The importance of English strongly influences the Japanese multiculturalism.  High schools are more likely to teach English as a second language than they are to teach other languages.  This is a question I would have liked to ask Misaki when she came to our classroom.  Were other languages spoken in her home?  What languages were offered in high school?  The demographic diversity that Japan has really surprised me.  I thought most of the colonized countries during the colonial era had the most diversity because of the new opportunities that they provided.  As they say in the article, there are so many factors of a country's diversity. 
Kubota states that the kokusaiaka does not really promote what it says it promotes, being heavily influenced by English.  This may be a disjunction with the policy but not necessarily a bad thing.  The mainstream languages are what they are for a reason, and even though it is sad that other languages are being neglected in schools, to spend money on teaching a language that the young citizens of the country will never use is impractical.  But then again, there is lots of different ethnicity, such as Korean, which could be even more useful because of the proximity of the countries.  What is seen as essential may be the impractical part of this kokusaiaka policy. 
The tie between language and culture is also another interesting point that Kubota makes.  I like Suzuki's thoughts on the Japanese international English system.  He suggests that, "learning English in order to express oneself and explain Japanese culture to the rest of the world, rather than learning about the cultures of Anglophone nations, which could be done more effectively in social studies" (Kubota, p.27).  In this way, English would be taught as a local context rather than an international context.  I believe that this would be a more effective way of teaching English.  But then again, in Spanish classes in the United States, teachers tend to teach cultures through that language.  Would it be appropriate to teach a localized Spanish rather than the Spanish of Spain?