One thing I didn’t learn fast enough when I first came to Japan was the many ways the Japanese say “no” and that the one thing the Japanese never say is “no”.

To clarify: The Japanese generally try to avoid confrontation and try to use what are, to the West anyway, more subtle clues. For example, if you’re team teaching and you ask your colleague for their opinion on a lesson plan you’ve written you can get any number of responses:

Response 1: Teeth Sucking. Meaning: No.
Response 2: Teeth Sucking + “Yes. Anything is okay.” Meaning: No.
Response 3: “Maybe it’s difficult for them.” Meaning: Hell no.
Response 4: “It is interesting.” Meaning: Get this is stupid crap out of my face.
Response 5: “Sorry I’m busy. Please show me tomorrow.” Meaning: Absolutely F@#king Not.

(Disclaimer: The total possible responses include but are not limited to the preceding examples.)

This is important to realize because if you don’t realize what’s just been said and go ahead with the lesson, your Japanese colleague will not not stop you. However, your Japanese colleague also will not help you.

Back when I was still in Nou-Machi I saw demonstrated, on two different occasions, a terrific warm up where students brought questions to class on a special form and then both the foreign teacher and the Japanese teacher quickly went down the rows answering and asking questions. It was all very efficienl, only took ten minutes or so of class time and every student got to speak.

It was a great way to get students talking and I immediately wanted to try it in my own classes. I explained it to my Japanese colleague and she gave Response 2. Once we got to class and started the activity I quickly discovered that although the forms had been assigned as homework, almost no one had written questions. I then had to wait while they tried to write questions and my Japanese colleague helped them.

Eventually someone wrote and asked a proper question and immediately a dozen other students wrote down the same question. Others asked the questions my colleague had given them.

This happened, in various forms, in many different classes with different lesson plans. Eventually, I learned to read the signals and, more importantly, how to ask the questions. I also learned that those subtle responses applied in the rest of Japan as well. One time, I offered to fix up the website of a small camera manufacturer. (I owned one of their cameras.) The president sent me an email explaining that he appreciated the offer but was getting ready for  trip overseas and I should contact him again the following week.

I never contacted him again. You don’t need to tell me Response 5 more than once. (At least not these days.)