All right, so Tiara told me this teaching story today — it’s not nearly as hilarious to me as Keiko the Thief…but I still got some giggles out of it.
She was teaching a three-way Fox lesson. For the sake of the story, I’ll just insert names we hear all the time: Masahide, Yuuka, and Noriko. Tiara sets up the role play. “Okay, Yuuka and Noriko, imagine that you had this report due today, but this morning, you spilled coffee on it. Tell Masahide what happened. Masahide, you are their boss. What would you say?”
They practice the role play, and Masahide replies with, “Incompetent bastards.”
Tiara was pretty surprised by his reaction and told him that maybe not quite like that. I can’t remember verbatim what she relayed, but it was something to that effect. Thus, she tried to correct the situation by saying, “Imagine you are in America.”
“America, okay, okay okay. Stupid bitches.”
While Yuuka and Noriko didn’t quite have the VOC comprehension for “incompetent bastards”, they certainly understood “stupid bitches”.
“NO!” Tiara said to me that she didn’t intend to shout at him, but that’s just how it came out. “No, we don’t say that in America!” (Depending on the situation…keep in mind, Nova is a learning institution and we are trying to teach them how to get by in an English speaking country without bodily harm.)
Isn’t the Japanese perception of American business great?
