I'm not sure what this question was meant to convey.

There are many countries (or cities) in the world where you can easily get by in English beacuse almost everyone you need to / want to interact with can speak English. Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm are 4 the come to mind even though their native languages are Dutch, French, German, Swedish.

Japan is not one of those countries. Yes, you can survive without speaking Japanese with a lot of effort and asking friends to translate.

So it's not an unreasonable question to ask if they speak English. It's effectively asking, are they liked the 4 cities mentioned above.

I was once at a bar in Tokyo and where I met a young French woman who was thrilled to be going back to France after 6 months in Japan. She had wrongly assumed the her English would get her by like it had in many other countries who's first language was not English.