Tag: English

The Duty English Speaker

Back around 1978, I had an appointment to see a fellow at a facility of Cannon just on the Tokyo side of the Tamagawa. Never wanting to make people wait, and more particularly wanting to leave enough time to find this facility that I was visiting for the first time, I left the office of the US company I was so early that I arrived far ahead of my appointment time. I resigned myself to cooling my heels for a while in the waiting area normally located just outside the receptionist desk.

These days, receptionist desks here are sometimes provided with telephones and a list of numbers to call. At the time, a carbon-based receptionist was standard.

I announced myself, handing over my Japanese business card and, apologizing for being so early, said that I would be fine waiting, no need to rush the person I was to meet with.

I related this to the receptionist in perfectively fine sales-ready Japanese. Her response was “Just a moment” in somewhat strange English, and she hurriedly called someone on the phone. I was hoping it was not the person I was to meet, because he might have felt obligated to drop what he was doing and come out to greet me. That fear was unwarranted, but what transpired was a bit odd.

The receptionist was calling an English-speaking person to rescue her from her problem with this foreigner in the lobby. Emergency, emergency, foreigner in lobby; this is not a drill!

I was sat down in the lobby and told (again, in strange English) that someone would be there shortly.

The person who arrived was not the person with whom I had an appointment, but rather someone you could call the duty hapless English speaker, who probably gets called in for such emergency situations.

When this fellow sat down with me, it was apparent to both of us what had gone wrong. We laughed and chatted for a while, after which he assured me that he would let the fellow I was there to see know that I had arrived but could wait.

This kind of thing is not so common nowadays, but there is still the expectation on the part of some people in Japan that when you see a foreigner’s lips moving, what is happening is English speech, and you need to react accordingly.

They speak English among themselves: The delusion of a clueless expat

In the late 1970s, I was the branch manager of a US company here in Japan, and one of the banks we used was the Tokyo branch of a bank the home office used, the now-defunct Seafirst bank in Seattle.

We had no particular problems with them, and I distinctly remember them gifting me some tickets to watch Sumo tournaments in Tokyo. One day, however, it was brought home to me just how clueless an expat in Japan could be.

Most of the people running the bank were, of course, native Japanese speakers. My contact included one Japanese employee and an American, apparently from the Seattle headquarters. One day, when I was meeting with the American, whose name I do not recall, the Japanese fellow participated, using his English, which was quite good, this being necessary because the American was not a Japanese speaker.

When the Japanese fellow left the meeting room to get something, the American said to me, with a straight face “You know, these people use English among themselves, even when we foreigners are not around.”

I was toying with making a quip about the language of the sound a Japanese tree might make falling when nobody is around to hear it, but I refrained. Such an attempt of sarcasm might have cut me off from the Sumo tickets.