I was the new teacher in the factory, and my students, a group of some thirty male engineers, were looking me up and down and making me feel even more nervous than I'd felt to begin with. Mr Sugimoto, a fussy, self-important little man who worked in the administration, stepped smartly up to the microphone to introduce me. I'd already decided that I didn't like him; he was an unctuous fellow with a condescending manner and poor English skills -- not that he knew it.
"Here she is, then," Mr Sugimoto began unceromoniously in Japanese, gesturing roughly in my direction. "Your new teacher. Her name's hard to pronounce, but maybe she'll help you by pronouncing it slowly. Foreigners' names! Ha, ha, ha!"
I began to feel even more nervous. His tone was worryingly disrespectful.
Mr Sugimoto wiped his eyes, still chuckling over my impossible foreign name. "Sorry she's not younger!" he announced, casting a sideways glance at me as though I were a side of pork he was casually inspecting. "I've looked at her resume and it says she's 30. Too bad! Next time we'll see if we can get one in her twenties!"
My jaw dropped. The bastard obviously didn't realize that I understood Japanese!
"She's not too bad looking I guess, but --" He suddenly stopped and frowned. "What?" he barked at a man sitting in the front row who had been watching my reaction and was nervously waving his hand in a frantic little 'Stop -- stop!' damage-control gesture.
"Um, Mr Sugimoto, I think she understands Japanese," the man half-whispered.
"Don't be silly, of course she doesn't!" He glanced over at me quickly, a furtive look in his eye. "Do-You-Understand-Japanese?" he asked in sentient-being-to- idiot tones.
I stared back at him, appalled. "I understand," I said frostily.
His reaction was so extreme it would have been funny if I hadn't been so irritated. He actually blanched right there in front of me. His face went a sickly color and his attitude did a nose dive from cocky and supercilious to slavishly apologetic. He actually bowed to me, and from that day on, Mr Sugimoto was kindly and respectful, and he watched his mouth around me. It was highly gratifying.
Two years later, I had a similar experience on yet another first-day-of-class.
"I can always tell the difference between Brits and Americans," boasted Mr Osaragi to a fellow classmate just before I took roll. "Usually it's their skin color." He gave me a long, speculative look. "Now her -- you can tell she's British by her skin color and her attitude."
The classmate made an appropriate noise, and Mr Osaragi went on.
"Very proper, see. Reserved." They both took a long look at me and I cringed. I was only reserved because it was the first day of class!
"Americans," Mr Osaragi continued, nailing himself right in, "they're all noise. Talk, talk, talk. The British? Very quiet. Like her."
I couldn't stand it any longer. Not only did I feel irked by Mr Osaragi's know-it-all attitude and his outlandish assumptions about Americans' skin color, I felt affronted for every single quiet, reserved American and noisy, boisterous Brit I happened to know.
"I'm American!" I blurted out. "I'm not British at all, I just work in a British school!"
Unlike Mr Sugimoto, Mr Osaragi never forgave me for understanding. Go figure.
