Eigo de Essay
Expanding Vocabulary "What's this?" is a question frequently asked by foreign visitors to Japan. I've been asked this question many times in my life as a native Japanese with acceptable English ability. When I was a college student, I was doing a part-time tour guide in a small town where professional English speaking guides were hard to come by. A travel agency hired students majoring in English. At the training, we learned things to do and not to do while guiding. One thing we were told to avoid saying was "I don't know" to visitors' questions. As you may be able to imagine, this college student had a lot of things she didn't know. I remembered things written in the guidebook given by the agency, so I could say things like "This temple was built 400 years ago," but when a tourist asked the name of a tree in front of the temple, my mind went totally blank. I didn't know the tree's name even in Japanese. I would tell them a made-up name and just hoped the visitor would forget the name right away. As I grew older, I became more knowledgeable. Later in my life, I worked at a company where some of my co-workers were Americans. They also asked lots of "What's this?" questions. When a new employee fresh from the States arrived, we always held a welcome party at an izakaya or a Japanese style pub. They served many different kinds of dishes including Japanese food. One American guy pointed at a small grilled fish on the table and asked what that was. I answered with confidence, "That's a capelin." "What's a capelin?" was his reply. He had never heard this English word. I thought that the fish names he had known were probably salmon, tuna and a few more. Years passed, and Japanese food and culture became popular around the world. Then I had an opportunity to go to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant in downtown Tokyo with several foreigners. I heard no "what's this?" this time. For one thing, everything was visual. For another thing, the foreigners all had a basic knowledge of sushi, including the fish names. They started saying, "ikura!", "hamachi!", and "amaebi!", all in Japanese. When we had eaten to our heart's content, I pressed the button to ask for the bill. A waiter came straight to me whose face was the one and only Japanese among the English speaking group and asked me if it'd be alright to total the bill. I said, "Barabara de onegaishimasu," which means one bill for each person. The foreigners liked the sound of "barabara" and asked what that meant. I said it meant "individually or separately," and they all practiced saying this word. "Barabara!" "Barabara!" Then we all went home barabara.
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