Studies on compulsory foreign language (L2) education in Japan often highlight inconsistencies between English textbooks and the policies defined by the Ministry of Education, criticising the way EFL is taught. In order to represent L2 education in a broader way, this article investigates a wider corpus with a double framework. To get a clearer view of L2 education in Japan, a corpus of textbooks for English and French as foreign languages was collected. The contents of the textbooks were examined through language teaching methodology and discourse analysis, to outline the main features of the materials, as well as the implicit representations of the students and the world that they convey. This analysis delves into several issues, such as how foreign languages are studied in Japan and for what reasons, how high schoolers are implicitly portrayed in Japanese L2 textbooks, what is expected from them, and whether or not those expectations depend on the language at issue (English/French). The preliminary findings presented in this paper also seem to suggest that behind a superficial didactic contradiction, a deeper connection with Japanese fundamental education laws can be seen.