Japan is a Country Built on Trust

If I had a dime (10 yen?) for every time someone has trotted out that old chestnut, I could hire the palm frond fanner/grape peeler that I’ve always wanted.

Sometimes, however, it’s true. In a mad dash to make it to my cello lesson yesterday, I left my cell phone someplace. At first, I thought I might have left it at the post office, so I dragged my butt back to the post office and assaulted them with pidgin Japanese. Using very small words, they informed me that they didn’t have my cellphone and that I was an impetuous foreign barbarian for even asking (not sure about the last bit).

So, I went back home to engage in the traditional cell phone divining ritual: calling yourself. If I had left my phone someplace in New York, this call would have one of two possible outcomes:

1. The new “owner” of my cellphone would answer, mock me mercilessly, Seinfeld-style, and then hang up so he could make international calls to Tajikistan at my expense.
2. The guy at the pawnship where my phone had been hocked would answer and demand a princely sum for the phone’s safe return

So it would be fair to say that my hopes for cell phone recovery were not particularly high.

I called and someone answered in Japanese. Pulling out all the stops, I told him “This is my cell phone!”. To which he replied:

Lots of Japanese I couldn’t understand…Oh, the guy I took to the train station…Even more Japanese I couldn’t understand.

Ah. I must have dropped my phone in a taxi that I’d taken earlier. Unfortunately, although I now knew where my phone was, I was also at my linguistic limits.

IMPORTANT FOREIGN LANGUAGE TIP ALERT

There is a simple, sure-fire way to solve this sort of problem in any foreign language. I’ll give you the Japanese version below, but just learn its equivalent in any language that you don’t speak, but wish you could, and you can be totally fluent within minutes. Here goes:

Nihongo wakarimasen. Sumimasen ga tsuma ni denwa shite kudasai. Denwa bango wa xxx-xxxx-xxxxx desu.

or “Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese. Please call my wife at xxx-xxxx-xxxx.” This remarkably simple sentence can make you effectively fluent in Japanese almost instantly. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, the cab driver came to our place, dropped off my phone and got a nice tip from a grateful gaijin.

After I got back upstaris to our apartment, Yukari told me that it would have been better to go to the liqour store and buy “beer tickets” so that I wasn’t giving him cash. Yes, apparently you can buy gift certificates redeemable for beer at any liqour store here in Japan. Wild!

Posted by pmk at February 18, 2004 3:12 PM | TrackBack