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In my first few months of living in Japan I was greatly excited by the amusement arcades there. The video games were outlandish, and the machines which produced your photo on a sheet of stickers, “Print Club”, became a minor obsession.
Before meeting a friend downtown one afternoon I had half an hour to kill; I ventured into the arcade and blew a few Yen on a shooting game which was my favourite at the time. I worked up quite a sweat killing bad guys when I suddenly remembered my friend. Looking around for a clock and not seeing one, I approached a group of teenaged girls doing Print Club. I knew the Japanese to be friendly people, and thought it wasn’t out of order at all for a large, sweating foreigner to go up to a group of school girls and practice his Japanese on them by asking the time.
My Japanese was elementary at best, but asking the time is easy. “Nan ji desu ka?” is all it takes. What came out of my mouth instead was, “Nan sai desu ka?” just a couple of innocent syllables away. What I asked the horrified looking girls was, “How old are you?” The looks on their faces told me I’d made a mistake, so I patted an imaginary watch on my wrist, but it was too late. I laughed nervously and hastily walked away, thinking of the possible headlines and consequences of a mere slip of the tongue.
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