Standard Japanese public education through to college/university include ~1k hours total of English classes, changing but still focused on word-for-word translations.

The goal and aim of those classes (I think) is so that 21st century Japanese engineers can decode foreign scientific papers and encode export user manuals on their own.

And so Japanese engineers can interpret and compose English text files as, one would handle C-like code. Consequently read/write data rates as well as emotional grasp are closer to that for code than speech, and the ability also gets dubious quick for anything "platform" specific and not literal. Like, even "to pull off" will cause an exception and quick jump/return with "achieve". It would be fair to say that calling it English literacy is a bit of a stretch.

It will do for many purposes, so in that sense, yes, Japanese people do know English.

There are people(not me) from rich or otherwise unique backgrounds or educated before WWII who use actual English and not that embedded English Lite, they're rare.