DAY 345: Liz's job in Japan was a corporate trainer and English teacher for businesspeople. Most of her clients were Japanese businessmen and businesswomen who needed to learn English for their employers, to reach a particular rating by the Foreign Services Institute so that they could communicate overseas. Most companies required a rating of 2.2 to 2.4 (on a scale of 0.0-5.0), which was fairly okay. (By comparison, George W. Bush scored a 3.4 and Bill Clinton scored a 4.2.)

Every Tuesday afternoon, Liz got a break from the corporate scene and went out to the suburbs north of Tokyo to teach English to a group of old Japanese suburban housewife-types -- one of them had a son who had taken the corporate training and turned them on to it.

"[The women] aren't really interested in learning the English so much," Liz told me as we rode off to the suburbs. "They see it as more of a social thing." (Just like real school -- not that there's anything wrong with that.)

The previous Tuesday she told the class that she'd bring a guest speaker to the next (me) and that their homework was to prepare an introduction and two questions to ask me.

A TRAIN AND BUS RIDE LATER, we arrived at the Saitama prefecture, a suburban area that reminded me a lot like suburban New Jersey. We walked into a multipurpose room in a local community center where tables and chairs were arranged in a rectangle, forum style, so people could look at each other and discuss things. Placed at every spot was an assortment of snacks brought in by the students following the old rule of bringing food to class: If you're going to bring food to class, you have to bring enough for everyone. The snacks followed the Japanese tradition of bringing sweets back from places you've gone away. I passed around the snack treats Liz bought in Nikko, while one woman named Yukiko passed snacks she brought back from a recent vacation to Canada: maple syrup cookies.

I sat at the head of the class like a teacher's pet. The faces of middle-aged Japanese women stared back at me while Mrs. Atsumi (Liz) took attendance. "This is Erik," she introduced me. "Did you do your assignment? You were supposed to write two questions for him."

The women shyly nodded yes.

"Now who wants to volunteer and introduce herself to Erik?"

The women, shy that they'd have to actually use their English in a "real" situation other than just to talk to their familiar English-speaking Canadian teacher of over a year, looked a bit nervous.

"If no one volunteers, can I pick someone?" I asked Mrs. Atsumi at the front table. "Because I always used to hate it when teachers did that to us."

"If no one volunteers," Liz announced to the class, "Erik is going to pick someone. So who wants to volunteer? Anyone?"

Threatened by the ultimatum, the women came out of their shells one by one -- sometimes by force of another volunteering for her. Eventually I met all the Japanese Golden Girls, who primarily didn't define themselves by what they did, but what their husbands or kids did. There was: Yukiko, the one who had just come back from Canada, who was also taking Tai Chi lessons; Mieko, who was quite an avid golfer; Yasuko, who had spent some time living in New York City and was happy to meet a New Yorker; Haruyo, reptile lover and wife of graphic novelist/illustrator Yasuo Ohtagaki of Moonlight Magic; and Yoshiko, originally from the Hiroshima area (and had been there when the A-Bomb dropped in 1945).

Each of them asked questions in varied levels of English fluency, and as predicted, it was the usual "What's your favorite country?" sort of thing -- to keep from thinking about it too long, my pre-thought out answer is always "Bolivia." I told them about my anaconda episode in the Amazon and the lesser-known fact that across the street from the Great Pyramids of Giza was a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

"And Pizza Hut!" Yasuko said. She had seen it on some Japanese television show.

THE LESSON OF THE DAY was comparatives and superlatives, i.e. when to "bigger," "biggest," "more" or "most." I never realized how hard it might be to learn English as a Second Language with all the exceptions, and I really appreciated those who made the effort. Mrs. Atsumi wrote examples on the board so they could understand and write their own examples (picture above). As an exercise, Mrs. Atsumi divided the class into three groups for a game; each "team" would try and stump the other two with a true or false statement using comparatives and superlatives. Since I, the guest speaking traveler was to be the judge of whether something was correct or not, the subject was world geography.

The Golden Girls were smart enough to stump each other, and even me with some tough hard-to-call statements:

TRUE OR FALSE:

1. Monaco is bigger than the Vatican.
   
2. Japan is more expensive than France.
   
3. Germans are the most polite people in the world.
   

(Answers below)

At the end of the school day, the class, Mrs. Atsumi and I gathered around for an old-fashioned class picture. Class that afternoon went well -- so well in fact that teacher Mrs. Atsumi didn't assign any homework.

LIZ WAS AMONGST A SPECIAL (BUT NOT EXCLUSIVE) GROUP of readers of this Blog that had rapidly elevated in the ranks, from "SBR" (Silent Blog Reader) status to Blogreader to Blog Hog to "character on 'The Trinidad Show.'" However, she wasn't the only Blogreader in Japan. No, there was another: Szlachta, who had e-mailed me from the other side of Tokyo. His name was actually John and he too was an American on a trip around the world with his Nicaraguan doctor girlfriend Melissa. After a couple of e-mails and phone calls, it was his turn to appear on "the show," as our itineraries had crossed paths.

At the suggestion of Liz, we went out to an onomono-yaki place, which specialized in the Japanese delicacy that is pretty much like a stuffed savory pancake with eggs, meat, noodles, mayonaisse and sauce. The restaurant was on the upper floor of a hi-rise in the Yebisu district on a nice moonlit night, where we sat around a hot griddle in the center of the table to cook up our onomono-yaki ourselves -- although Liz did all the honors so we wouldn't be too sloppy, particularly with the sprinkling of dried fish flake garnish.

"Wow, you work for [world-famous architect] Frank Gehry?" I said to John in our introductory conversation. "Do you know who Frank Gehry is?" I asked Liz. "That's like being in film and saying you know Steven Spielburg."

"I know him too," John said. "And Brad Pitt. He's a big fan of architecture."

As exciting as that sounded, John too had grown tired of the corporate scene in his late twenties and unplugged himself out of The Matrix to explore the world for six months with Melissa at his side. So far they were having a good time, particularly in Tokyo, a city they had decided to spend more time than they originally alotted.

The four of us had our pancakes and washed them down the Japanese way (with beer), all while admiring the lights come on below us.

For Liz it was a school night, so John, Melissa and I went out for drinks in another part of town at Cube Zen, this trendy Euro/Japanese lounge that served up a mean shochu (Japanese hard liquor similar to vodka and sake) on the rocks. We sat around and talked the usual traveler talk in addition to raving about our impressions of Japan -- its cleanliness, its modern culture and its pay telephones with the animated woman on the LCD screen that bows thank you when you hang up. John too was amazed, just as I was, just how polite the Japanese could be -- he would have probably have gotten question number three correct if he had been in class that afternoon.

_{ANSWERS: 1. T; 2. T (based on the priced I'd seen at McDonald's); 3. F (that honor goes to the Japanese!)}

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