Mitsuya Goto can tell any aspiring student how to learn English. "You really have to want to," he might say, and "you must use any tool available to you."

In his case, when he was still a high-school student his family was bombed out of their home in Nagoya. "I determined that I would grab the first opportunity to go to the United States.

"I told myself that I would learn the language first. I did so after the end of the war by listening to the American Armed Forces radio, and reading The Japan Times. During the day I worked on my father's farm; at night I studied English."