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.