Now it belongs to globalization. Although the largest population in the world comes from China, English speakers are the most widely distributed in the world, so many people must learn English, as long as you don't want to fall behind in globalization.
There is a reason why Britain is called the empire that never sets. Its colonies used to be all over the world, so there are many English-speaking people in the world. If you don't learn to speak English, it will be bad for your future development. Many enterprises take English as a threshold when enrolling students.
Therefore, not only Japanese, but also countries whose mother tongue is not English are advocating their descendants to learn English.