Wetting my whistle on a humid afternoon inside a Tokyo establishment for the soberly impaired, I listened to the following affirmation by a foreign longtime friend.
"Half of the gaijin in Japan couldn't succeed anyplace else," he declared. "While the other half could make it anywhere." He seemed to be waiting for a response, so I told him I supposed half of what he said to be true. Sensing our souls to be in synch, he blitzed on.
"Can you imagine any other nation on earth where people can earn money just by speaking their native tongue? I know this one fellow, for example, with no degrees and no common sense. Yet, this pair of doctors pays him 60,000 yen a month only to sit and speak English with them once a week . . . while at the same time they cram him full of sirloin and beer. Criminal!"