This post gives me the overpowering urge to write a rebuttal in Japanese just to prove that an American can.
Let me hum a few bars: if your customers don't speak English, and your colleagues don't speak English, and your business partners don't speak English, then your refusal to use languages other than English cannot be justified by it being efficient. It is hubris to think otherwise -- an arrogant sort of laziness of thought which is entirely different from the productive laziness that programmers generally cultivate.
A programmer who cannot talk to his colleagues and customers, and blames his inadequacy on them, is a failure at his profession : writing code which solves problems for people. If you only get as far as "writing code" without understanding the people and their problems, congratulations, you fail.
On the plus side, the prevalence of attitudes like this means you can do pretty well for yourself if you're bilingual. I got stopped on the train today by the guy who got me my current job (random coincidence -- we live in adjacent small towns). He started the conversation like he always does "Hey, Patrick, how's work? Say, do you know any bilingual engineers looking for employment?"
This week apparently its an aerospace project that needs them. Its always something -- there's hundreds of billions in trade happening between the US and Japan every year, huge portions of it are high-tech, and engineers here are only marginally better at speaking English than engineers in America are at Japanese. (In my experience, though, they're not aggressively proud of being ignorant.)