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Comment by rjrdi38dbbdb | Hacker News Reader

> I even wondered if it was a front for some other kind of business.

Just curious what your suspicions were at the English conversation lounge and why it made you uncomfortable?

Partly it was the location: An upper floor of a building in a neighborhood full of bars and pachinko parlors, which seemed much sleazier to me then than it would now.

But more it was, I think, that I didn’t understand yet why Japanese college students and office workers would pay money to practice English with me and a few other recent foreign arrivals. The fact that much of the conversation consisted of the customers asking me personal questions—“Where are you from?” “Why did you come to Japan?” “Do you like Japanese women?”—made me suspicious, too.

In retrospect, the place was almost certainly not a front for anything sinister but just a way for the owner to try to make some money from the shortage of opportunities to speak English in Japan. And the focus on personal questions was just a sign of the customers’ limited repertoire of conversational English. But it took me a while to grasp all that.

Spend enough time in Japan, and you realize that young to middle-aged Japanese people really do understand that competence in English will give them an edge -- but they don't know where or how to go about learning so they will try damn near anything, especially if they think it's easy or a "shortcut". There's potentially a big market for apps like Rosetta Stone or Duolingo over there, I don't know how things like that are actually doing among Japanese though.

When I was hanging out in bars there, young women would approach me and beg: "Teach me Englishu!" They saw that I was white and foreign and figured I could just pour English fluency into their heads.

As for the personal questions -- yeah, I've undergone enough foreign-language instruction to understand that these are things people resort to just to have something to talk about. One question that kept coming up was "Who is your favorite singer?" Just about everyone who asked me this also provided their own answer to the question and it was always the same -- Lady Gaga. (The album Born This Way had just dropped in Japan at the time and Lady Gaga was all the rage -- bigger than One Piece, even.)

> so they will try damn near anything

2012.. i am not a native english-speaker but white, in Tokyo for 2 weeks, staying in friend's apartment, not knowing a word except "Arigato". One day, In some very big shop, i was looking for some locally made hand cream, and after walking the shelves with hundreds of things only labelled in japanese hieroglyphs, i asked the lady on the cash-desk "Where are hand-creams?" and she showed me to one shelf full of Avon stuff (which i saw but avoided), and eventually at its end there were some others japanese. So i looked at there and picked one or two, choosing by colorfulness of the bottle :) All that time, a student-age-girl was staying at next row, keeping and looking at some pocket device in her hands, and when i finally picked something, she approached me and asked, in not-that-bad-english : "Excuse me, did you ask for a "hand cream"?

You know, this picking of any opportunity to train your hearing/speaking is.. amazingly diligent. And their curiosity also amazed me.

Ever since i'd like to try move and live there, but.. too bad it's very difficult to go to work or live there. Expensiveness is only one little part of it..

Yeah, I went to a frozen yogurt place and scraped together enough Japanese to ask if there was an English speaker. They brought before me the store manager, a 22-year-old girl fresh out of college who'd spent a year in California as an exchange student and was super over the moon to be speaking to a real American once again. It was super cute, and we just stood there and talked about random stuff for several minutes before I realized I still wanted frozen yogurt and didn't know how to operate the machines or pay for my order.

I did the same thing and seized any opportunity to practice. I spent a lot of evenings that vacation in bars, just speaking to locals so I could git gud enough in Japanese to... function at a basic level there. I think I gained more Japanese language levels during those two weeks than I did my three semesters of collegiate study of the language.

It's lovely to visit, but unless Rakuten or Nintendo or somebody offered me a too-good-to-pass-up career opportunity, I couldn't foresee myself living in Japan. It's pricey, and as a white dude I would always be seen as an outsider (the literal translation of gaijin) with attendant social disadvantages: I couldn't live or work in certain places, more paperwork and bureaucratic hoops I'd need to jump through, the funny looks and people hiding from me (not so much a problem in Osaka but I hear it happens in Tokyo a lot).

Oh, you know those radio DJ booths in Splatoon where you can look through the plate glass and see the hostesses making their broadcast? Those are actual things in Japan. I passed by one in Doutonbori and the radio hosts started making remarks about the funny foreigner. Yay.

I’ve only visited once, but my impression of their urban areas was that Japanese zoning laws and planning permit are very different to even UK ones, and worlds apart from American ones. I assume there’s some centuries-old historical reasons that I’m just not aware of.

There are residential houses sandwiched between restaurants, perfectly legitimate businesses built on top of some ‘perfectly legitimate’ businesses and underneath other even shadier businesses. This definitely means that any district with a focus on entertainment will often seem sketchier than it really is.

A lot of english conversation in Japan functions as de-facto paid compansionship. It's not exactly a front for escorting, but it's not completely not that either. In the west there tends to be a clear sharp line between customer service and sex work, whereas in Japan there is much more of a sliding scale from paying by the hour to hang out in a bar with friendly bar staff, to having more flirty conversations with them, through clothed touching to what's essentially a strip club experience.

The states does have breastauraunts like Hooters where you can watch the game and the bartenders and waitresses happen to be flirty and buxom, but they're compensated by tips instead of by the hour.

I almost mentioned Hooters, I think they're the exception that proves the rule - they're seen as unusual and seedy, whereas in Japan that's pretty much the norm for a bar.

"the exception that proves the rule" is such a terrible expression. I do not understand why people use it.

At some point I thought that it absurd on purpose but I had some people explaining me the rationale behind it (there is no rationale - if there is an exception it at best weakens the "rule")

It’s a folkism, but consider this: If a rule doesn’t have any exceptions, is it really a rule? If a rule doesn’t exist how could there be any exceptions?

The expression is referring to an implicit or unstated rule. Defining it is hard but people know when it has been broken. Hooters is an exception, the rule is, don't be like Hooters.

Thank you! I never understood the expression, but this explanation was immediately clarifying for me.

I see from Wiktionary that it was originally a legal concept, expressed in medieval Latin.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/exception_that_proves_the_rul...

Just as you say, the point is that a rule is implied by a specific exception, as in the example "free entry on Sundays", which implies the unstated rule "pay for entry on other days".

The exception weakens the rule, it's true, but may also reveal the rule.

‘Prove’ was historically used as a synonym for ‘test’, which gives the phrase quite a different meaning. Like how ‘result’ is now sometimes used to mean ‘positive outcome’, as in a football fan saying ‘we got a result’

This phrase only made sense when it was explained to me that it’d be better phrased as “the exception that proves the existence of the rule”.

(if there were no rule, there wouldn’t be any exceptions to it, or nothing would seem exceptional with respect to the (previously unstated) rule)

The norm for a bar in Japan is to be like Hooters?

Eh, what? This wasn't my experience at all. I didn't conduct a study, but I was in a good few bars over there, in three different cities. Can you elaborate on what you're referring to here?

Think the takeaway was more about the "seediness" aspect of Hooters do to it's being pretty exceptional/unusual in American dining culture.

Hooters is a pretty unique restaurant experience in the US and is therefore considered different/further from the norm and frankly by many seedy. If there were more places like Hooters in the US then this would probably not be true.

The comment was trying to explain that in Japan you have a lot of places that would be analogous to Hooters in the US...so it's not exceptional/not seedy. Maybe not quite the "norm" but common enough to not be really something that gets noticed or have a connotation like "seedy".

Japan has (had?) an exact analog to Hooters, namely "sexy izakayas" like Hanako, where pretty girls in very short skirts serve mediocre bar food. These were pretty much obliterated by COVID though, and were always a small niche.

Unlike the US, Japan has a highly visible and de facto legal sex industry, so if anything sexy izakayas are/were at the less seedy end of the scale.

In my experience a bar (not a pub/居酒屋, a バー) will frequently be a place that always has female staff working, where those staff will be wearing makeup and at least somewhat attractive clothes and expected to converse with customers. Not always - there are definitely bars focused on music or some hobby or particular kinds of drinks - but often enough that it's what I'd expect if you just said bar.

15 years ago I was a student in Japan and worked a part-time job at one of these conversation places. One of the successful teachers put it best: "You're not a teacher, you're a chat show host".

You're doing entertainment first. A game here, a crazy story there. Nothing to challenging, people want to have a polite, entertaining experience. If they learn something along the way that's fine but they won't really care if they don't.

There was a wide range of students. Some serious, usually planning to study overseas in the future. Some people just there for a hobby or an outlet. There were a few people who came to offload their problems to someone who they felt was outside the normal social structure (and therefore not going to judge them). I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.

> I think people in general felt they were much freer to speak using English rather than Japanese.

That's true to my experience with Japanese ESL students (not in Japan). Some explicitly told me that themselves; many others had that vibe.

I likened it (and my later work a the token gaijin in a large company), as being a pet, or a zoo animal. Treated well, but never integrated. I was told that I could never be a manager in my company, because it would make Japanese people anxious to have a foreign boss.

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