The Future Tense, Imperfectly

I stand at the front of the class in the National Air Defense Academy during a class on the future tense. I teach English as a native speaker. The dozen members of the class sit in uniform.

“I shall return,” a major says, quoting Gen. Douglas MacArthur. What governs the use of “shall”? he asks.

The Ministry of Education thinks that English should be taught in elementary schools. Now, English is required starting in junior high schools. Japanese teachers of English are often criticized for teaching a subject they don’t know.

“The students speak English better than their parents,” says a junior high school teacher during an open house.

Other Japanese English teachers roll their eyes when he spends a stubborn hour trying to explain a pun that has something to do with the word for cat being like a gold coin. “They will miss the humor,” written advice from my company’s office tells me about explaining jokes. Teachers from the United States, Australia and England speak simple English among themselves at our office.

The flexible language skills of the Japanese show boldly at train stations where three different writing systems announce the stops.

Photos of the bombing of Hiroshima 50 years ago at a shopping plaza between the train station and my office exhibit bloody backs and people soaking in rivers.

I take the yellow trains of the Chuo Line and the orange Sobu and the blue-striped Tozai through the crowded city. The privatization of the railway system during the past eight years is nearly complete. The Tokyo subway network is the largest in the world. I cannot explain to the Japanese the humor of “train packers” with white gloves during rush hour.

On a hot rainy night I take an unfamiliar train route. I remember “Gulliver’s Travels.” A young giantess holds Gulliver in her palm, where he peers into her enormous crater-like pores. Transfer at giant Brobdinag--in Tokyo, the station is Bubaigawara. Take the exit after rude Yahoo--in Tokyo, the station is Yaho. In Japan, it is we Americans who are sometimes regarded as huge and nasty.

My friend meets me with his 2-year-old daughter. The child examines me closely with her three languages--a monster of polyglot only. We walk along the narrow, cobbled road.

I can almost read the phonetic Japanese writing. The letters could be from Dr. Seuss: There are Zs with tails like a g, Ts with two crosses and an L shape that flips to indicate different sounds.

In addition to teaching, I give tests and grade fluency. The “Tester’s Manual and Scoring Criteria” measures the rate of language flow. It assigns numerical values. How well do the employees of a government office speak? What about the mass-transit engineers on their way to Egypt? The test takes eight minutes.

The last comment is:

“4.9 = A+ At this level, the only difference between the testee and an educated native speaker is that the testee probably still does mathematical calculations in her/his native tongue.”