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.
