I am a bike and hike guide in rural Japan. I had a request to do a three-day guided trip in Tokyo for a family of six. I declined.

Me: “I do not do Tokyo. I haven’t been there in years, plus there are plenty of tour guides who live there and know the area.”

I then tried to find someone for her, but since it was around the New Year’s break, none of the other private guides were available. She begged me to help her. I helped her (for free) with planning for transportation and presented various options of things to see (which I took right from the other tour guides’ itineraries listed on the web), and she still wanted me to go there, a couple of hours away.

Okay. I broke down. I figured I could get a paid trip to Tokyo and visit some friends.

One of the things she mentioned was seeing Sumo. There were no Sumo tournaments at that time, but I made an appointment to visit a Sumo practice stable which is only available to foreigners if they have a Japanese-speaking guide with them. They could not have gone alone.

The rules at the stable are:

• Be on time! This group royally screwed that up.

• It is not for gawking; it is for true Sumo enthusiasts. The stable let us slide on this one.

• You have to stay until the end. This means a few hours of watching Sumo drills.

About thirty minutes into the practice, the woman came to me.

Client: “I think my children are tired. Let’s go.”

Bear in mind that these were all adult children.

Me: “No, we can’t. It would be rude, and they have a rule.”

Client: “But the kids look tired.”

Me: “Okay, I will ask.”

I went over to the teacher and pretended like I was asking him if we could go, but I wasn’t. Instead, I just made them wait an extra hour and sit through the experience they had asked for and that few foreigners would get to experience.

Then, we went to the highlights of Tokyo. One was a big temple that is very famous, so it has lots of tourists.

Client: “Ugh, this is too touristy. I want to see the real Japan. Can’t we go to Asakusa?”

Me: “Oh, I’m sorry, maybe you couldn’t hear me before; Asakusa is where we are now.”

I went out of my way to find out-of-the-way places with character to eat where I was sure there would be no other foreign tourists, but she vetoed me.

Client: “No, we want to go to this famous place we saw in [Travel Guide].”

Of course, it was a kind of theme restaurant aimed at foreign tourists, who were 90% of their clientele. They got back to the hotel, and she asked me:

Client: “What is the plan for tomorrow?”

Me: “I thought we would walk from here to Shinjuku and pass through some interesting areas along the way. Some are crowded and popular with tourists but also very popular with the Japanese people. It is well worth it.”

Client: “We can do that by ourselves — unless there are any secret areas?”

Me: “No. I am afraid that there are not any real ‘secret’ places in Tokyo. If it is interesting, someone has written about it, and you will find tourists there. We can go wander through some small quiet neighbourhoods, and I can almost guarantee that you will not see many foreigners, and if you do, they will be locals.”

Client: “Is it in the guidebook?”

Me: “No.”

Client: “Well then, what is good about it? We can do that ourselves, as well!”

Me: “Okay. I agree. I will tell you what I have planned for the next two days, and I am sure you can do it by yourselves. There is plenty of English-language material in Tokyo for tourists. Let’s just say goodbye here.”

I fired my clients, and unfortunately, due to being in a rush in the morning to get to the Sumo, and just not being able to get a chance for them to get cash to pay the full amount for that day, I had to leave with only the deposit.

Luckily, the deposit covered my transportation, and there are cheap capsule hotels in the area.

The day after I fired the customers, I did exactly what I would have done with them, and I loved it. A few weeks later, my family and I had a stopover in Tokyo, and we did that same walk, and they loved it, too.

My time in Tokyo had come to an end. My buddy was helping me bring my luggage to the airport, going through various train stations along the way. At one point, we were near the top floor of a station and needed to get to the ground level, so we headed to the elevator.

The elevator had just let a group of people off and we could clearly see the interior. It had an extra set of buttons in the back corner and was otherwise empty save for an old lady on the opposite side. As she saw us approaching this woman promptly lunged toward the buttons in the back and mashed the “door close” button.

She was long gone from our sight after we had to wait for the elevator to make an extra round. I feel like I should’ve been offended by her action, but honestly, seeing how rapidly she moved to close the door on us was a sight to behold.

My boyfriend and I are cuddling on the couch watching TV. The show is talking about the different fish that can be found in Tokyo Bay when I give into my ADHD impulses and bite my boyfriend’s arm. 

TV: “…and the female fish will devour the male if he annoys her!”

Boyfriend: “…[My Name]?!”

I had to stop biting him because I was laughing too hard.

I’ve submitted several stories about my friends, family, and neighbors, and I’m thankful they’ve been published, but I’m hoping y’all won’t mind one more from my paternal grandmother. It’s my favorite of the many anecdotes she shared.

Dad’s family was an Air Force family, and they once got stationed in Tokyo and Okinawa in the 1950s for about four years. (They actually returned to the States right before the very first Godzilla film was released in theaters, but I digress.)

One day while in Tokyo, my grandfather had to speak with his commanding officer before some errands, so he left Grandma with their three kids in the car to wait.  

While they waited, the car started shaking. Grandma was afraid that meant an earthquake was building up and panicked since it was the first time she’d experienced one. But just as she was wondering if it was going to get worse, how to keep the children safe and calm, and if her husband would be all right…

…about forty sumo wrestlers went jogging by as part of their training.

Of all the things Grandma had thought might happen in Japan, that certainly wasn’t one of them.

I’m the author of this story, and I’ve been living in Japan and teaching English for over eight years now.

For several reasons, I have a strict no-children policy when it comes to my students, but occasionally, I can be persuaded to waive it — perks of being a private tutor! In one case, I end up teaching a Japanese boy, beginning when he is eleven. 

I have very little faith in English-language textbooks since they’re either riddled with mistakes or far too stilted to be “natural” English. Instead, I make my own materials or use flashcards, and my lessons tend to be less structured than in a classroom. For example, if a student asks me to explain a grammar point, I’ll happily spend most of the lesson on that instead of sticking to the plan.

The parents of this particular boy are absolutely wonderful; they pay very well, they provide me with a drink when I come to their home for the lesson, and best of all, they stay out of my way and let me get on with teaching how I like. 

That said, I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to teaching this boy, as all my students and materials are adult-based. He adores video games, however, so I hit upon a brainwave: the family has a laptop, I have a Steam account, and I also have a collection of old 1990s LucasArts games on there. 

Bingo! I talk to his parents and explain that although the learning curve is going to be very steep, their son will learn natural English in a fun way. They’re all for it, so I get their permission to install Steam and download “The Secret Of Monkey Island” — think “Pirates Of The Caribbean”, to the point that many game fans believe that the movie was inspired by this game series — and off we go! 

And it works brilliantly. For those not in the know, LucasArts has a series of point-and-click adventure games such as the “Monkey Island” series where you click on a verb — “Open”, “Close”, “Pick Up”, “Talk To”, etc. — and then on the object you want to interact with. Not only does this give my student nine useful verbs right from the get-go, but it also gets him into building simple sentences — “Pick Up Mug”, “Give X to Y”, and so on. If I use the old-style version of the games, I can also pause when the subtitles are on the screen so we can discuss the grammar, and later games in the series feature voice-acting, which helps build his listening skills.

Given it’s aimed at a native-speaking market, I’m willing to translate most of the English into Japanese for him, but only after he makes an attempt to do so himself. He’s invested in the game, so he’s keen to do so, but he obviously struggles in the beginning.

One segment of the game involves sword-fighting with pirates. Basically, this involves fighting a lot of pirates so you can learn insults and then use those insults on other pirates so they can teach you the correct response. The insults themselves obviously aren’t worth remembering, but they use a lot of excellent grammar points, so I do insist upon [Student] translating them. For example, “I’m glad to hear you attended your family reunion” teaches “glad to [verb]”, “happy to [verb]”, “sorry to [verb]”, etc. 

At the end of one lesson, we’ve run a little over the usual hour, which I don’t charge extra for, since I’m having a blast revisiting my childhood. [Student]’s having a problem with the translation of one particular in-game insult, and I’ve already made up my mind that this will be the last sword fight of the lesson.

Me: “Okay. So, you know ‘handkerchief’.”

Student: “Yes… but not this word.”

Me: “That’s okay. You can look it up in your dictionary.”

Normally, I discourage his use of the dictionary, as I want to encourage him to think and expand his vocabulary by using other words that mean the same thing, but I’m honestly not sure how to get this word across considering his English is still rather limited at this point.

[Student] begins eagerly searching in his electronic dictionary, and [Student]’s mom enters the room. She always does so very quietly and never disturbs the lesson but just goes right to work doing something in the kitchen.

I speak quietly in Japanese to [Student]’s mom.

Me: “Hi. It’s okay; we’re just finishing up.”

Two seconds later, [Student] finds the word and puzzles over the translation for a few moments, and then his whole face lights up in pure delight.

Student: *Loudly, in very excited Japanese* “Sensei, I’ve got it! I understand! The word was ‘blood’, so the sentence is, ‘My handkerchief will mop up your blood!’”

[Student]’s mom never commented or raised so much as an eyebrow, but I couldn’t help wondering what she must have thought of that particular lesson!

For the curious among you, I kept using this teaching technique until we’d completed the first three games in the series. By the end of “Monkey Island 3”, [Student] understood 80% to 90% of what was being said and could speak reasonably fluently with the native teachers in English class, along with being able to follow English-language news programs on TV.

However, at that point, he’d had enough of video games, so we moved on to “Asterix” (a comic book series, which was a dismal failure; I really should have known better) followed by “Tintin”, which turned out to be such a roaring success that his mother actually bought the albums from me so [Student] could reread them!

Related:
Ah, The Delightful Quirks Of Gender
Ah, The Delightful Quirks Of Language