A Nostalgic Tale: How to Learn English the Hard Way: Just Get Ignored in Shops

 

 

Permit me a moment of reminiscence, an old woman's soliloquy, if you will. This is a story from some forty years ago.

 

For a brief three-year period, my family found itself living in Britain in the late of the 1980’s. It was the height of Japan’s bubble economy, a time of exuberance and affluence. Britain, in contrast, was grappling with economic stagnation. Not only was the economy sluggish, but the sudden influx of Japanese imports and the expansion of Japanese businesses left many in Britain feeling uneasy. Some, particularly those who had lived through a different era, harboured a deep resentment towards the prosperity of Japan.

 

A significant undercurrent to this tension was, of course, the legacy of the Second World War. Britain, once master of the seven seas, had held colonies across Southeast Asia, including Burma and Singapore—regions where it had clashed directly with Japan. Even in the late 1980s, the memory of that conflict persisted among those of a certain age. The sight of a non-Western nation, a once-defeated Japan, rising to economic prominence—surpassing Britain itself—was, for some, an unbearable affront to national pride.

 

At the time, Britain saw an influx not only of Japanese expatriates but also of Hong Kong migrants and short-term language students from Japan. I write "so I was told" because my own knowledge was second-hand, gathered from my parents who ventured into the city during the day. They often remarked on how frequently they encountered Japanese speakers in the streets. While most had come for study or work, I was given the impression that, during the bubble era, Japanese migrants outnumbered their Hong Kong counterparts—a demographic shift that, in retrospect, speaks volumes about the global flows of capital, culture, and power at the time.

 

Economic shifts do not occur in a vacuum; they inscribe themselves onto the everyday interactions of people in ways both subtle and overt. For the Japanese in Britain during the late 1980s, these inscriptions often took the form of exclusionary practices—what might be termed micro-embargoes, carried out at the level of the shop counter and the ticket booth.

 

It took little more than a hint of Japanese identity for certain shopkeepers to enact their own small-scale economic resistance. A cashier who beams "Yes!" while ensuring no transaction takes place. A woman at the till slamming the register shut with a curt "Nothing for Japs here." A shopkeeper flipping the sign to "Closed" as soon as we approached. Even in the underground, the ticket booth would suddenly sport a "Break Time" notice the moment we stepped forward. This was not an isolated experience; my siblings and acquaintances reported similar encounters.

 

It was one thing to expect discomfort from those unaccustomed to Asian faces. But the hostility was not merely incidental—it was explicit, performative, even ritualistic. At the supermarket deli counter, a worker announced, "I’m sick of selling to Japs. I’m heading to the back," before disappearing from view.

 

At the time, I was at a school, newly arrived in Britain. My exposure to English had been limited to the classroom; I had not real chance to use it in real life. And so, I listened. I absorbed. I returned home and pored over dictionaries, deciphering the phrases that had surrounded me that day.

 

This was language acquisition by necessity. How to place an order. How to ask for an alternative. What to say at the till. How to purchase a newspaper. These transactions, mundane for locals, became sites of both struggle and adaptation. I learned to stand at a careful distance, catching fragments of conversation without drawing attention, mentally archiving useful expressions before looking them up at home. In time, I no longer needed the dictionary. Mimicry alone was enough to navigate the basic functions of daily life. This, I suspect, is an unspoken rite of passage for many living in a foreign land.

 

Proficiency altered the landscape. The more I frequented certain shops, the easier the transactions became. Recognition softened the edge of exclusion. The shop assistants, too, adjusted, remembering that I was one of the "manageable" ones—someone who could communicate, however imperfectly.

 

Yet the thresholds of acceptance remained. Initiation was required. One stationery shop had once displayed a "Closed" sign the moment I approached, only to reopen when a white customer arrived. I followed the man inside, seized the opportunity, and asked—deliberately, carefully, in the most English-sounding English I could muster—whether they stocked what I needed. "Oh," the shopkeeper said, visibly relieved, "so you do speak English, then." The transaction proceeded smoothly after that.

 

Such moments were tedious, but not universal. Still, in a non-negligible number of establishments, passage through this unspoken ritual of exclusion was the price of entry.

 

Language is not just communication; it is social positioning, power, and, at times, even an existential risk. During my years in Britain, I remained acutely aware of pronunciation and intonation. The closer my speech aligned with the local accent, the fewer the barriers I encountered in daily life. Fluency was a shield—or so I thought.

 

Yet after about a year, a different kind of problem emerged. I had underestimated the British tendency—at least among certain individuals—to demand explanations for things that unsettled them. Some were simply unable to let an incongruity slide.

 

One afternoon, after PE in a large park, we were making our way back to the school building when an older man directing traffic positioned himself in the middle of the road. As we walked past, chatting among ourselves, he suddenly grabbed my arm and yanked me back with such force that my feet nearly left the ground.

 

"Why do you speak English?" he demanded.

 

I explained that I was a student at the nearby school and asked him to let go—I had a class to attend.

 

"Never heard an Oriental speaking English before," he muttered, finally releasing me. "Right then, off you go, watch your way."

 

This was not an isolated incident. It happened often enough that my classmates learned to respond with weary resignation. "Again?" they would sigh, as I was stopped, questioned, or pulled aside.

 

My hyper-attunement to language did not end outside the classroom. Inside, it took a different form.

 

Unlike my peers, I had never written an essay in English before arriving in Britain. But at my international school, assessments required short-form explanations and essay responses. To cope, I took verbatim notes in almost every class.

 

A lesson lasted just over an hour, and although I struggled, the teacher’s deliberate pacing allowed me to capture enough of their speech to reconstruct it later. At home, I rewrote my notes in full, turning the day’s fragmented phrases into a coherent record—a double process of transcription and revision that functioned as both survival mechanism and self-imposed discipline.

 

Beyond school, I relied on radio. I was fortunate: Britain had a dedicated channel for radio dramas (which still exists today, now available online). I recorded broadcasts on cassette tapes and repeatedly listened, even when the meaning eluded me. I would repeat phrases aloud, matching my voice to the rhythm of the actors’, shaping my mouth around the contours of the language.

 

Three years passed quickly. The time was short, yet by the final year, I could shop without stress and, to some extent, follow more complex discussions in class. Fluency, it turned out, was not just about learning a language—it was about learning the social terrain in which that language operated.

 

Perhaps the most challenging period of my time in Britain coincided with the transition from the Shōwa to the Heisei era. The Emperor, at that time, remained an enigma—a figure shrouded in secrecy, barely touched even by the most dedicated Japanologists. But while scholarly inquiry lagged behind, everyday encounters on the streets of London made Japan and its history an inescapable subject.

 

The scrutiny directed at East Asians in public spaces was palpable. Some of it was casual, some outright confrontational. On occasion, individuals would approach me, declaring that they had lost family members to the Japanese military. Others—strangers on the street, fellow passengers on the underground—would pose direct questions about the Second World War. As a seventeen-year-old, my defence was simple: "I’m taking history in school, but there’s still so much I don’t know. I’ll keep studying." That was usually enough to defuse the situation.

 

But another question—one that seemed innocuous at first—soon became a persistent irritation. 4 years later when I was on University’s exchange programme, I was asked this question quite frequently.

 

"So, where do you actually come from?"

 

I initially misunderstood, responding with "Japan," only to be met with:

 

"No, no, I mean, where do you actually come from?"

 

It was tedious. My default strategy became disengagement. A kind explanation such as “I am om Japan” was on observersation. Over time, however, I began to understand that this question had a history of its own.

 

I later learned that the "actually" in this question was a marker, not of simple curiosity, but of a deeper struggle over belonging. It was a question routinely asked of second- and third-generation Japanese immigrants—people who spoke English fluently, naturally, and yet were still expected to account for their origins. It was, in many ways, the same question biracial Japanese citizens face in Japan: "You don’t look Japanese—so where are you really from?"

 

In both cases, the question assumed a gap between ethnicity and national identity, between appearance and belonging. In Japan, many second-generation mixed-race individuals do not even speak their non-Japanese parent's language. Yet they, too, are asked to explain themselves, as though their existence demands an origin story.

 

I never took issue with accented English, but in a country that viewed Japan with suspicion, I quickly realised that mirroring local speech patterns could function as a form of protection. The less I sounded foreign, the fewer the obstacles. But even the smallest shift in pronunciation elicited exaggerated reactions—reactions that, in retrospect, reveal just how rare East Asians were in 1980s London.

 

For short-term residents like my family, the role was clear: we were guests, not immigrants. My parents drilled this into me—our job was to conduct ourselves with courtesy, never to offend, never to disrupt. This mindset shaped our entire approach to living abroad.

 

Looking back, I see this as more than just a matter of politeness. It was a survival strategy, a tacit negotiation with a society that had yet to reconcile its past with the presence of new faces. Forty years ago, London was still adjusting to the idea that people who looked like me could also speak its language.

 

Time passes, and with it, language evolves. A friend of mine, who spent two years in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic, remarked on the sheer diversity of accents in London. She found it striking—how many different national intonations and speech patterns coexisted in the city.

 

To me, this was nothing new. Nearly four decades earlier, when I lived in London, the same dynamic was at play. Indian Londoners spoke with Indian-inflected English, African immigrants carried the distinct tonalities of their home countries, and Europeans brought their own linguistic imprints. In this sense, little had changed. But what intrigued me about my friend’s comment was his own linguistic background—she had spent part of his childhood in the United States.

 

Her observation, then, seemed at odds with her own experience in an immigrant nation. When I pressed her further,s he explained, "In America, everyone adapts to the beautiful local accent."

 

This was a revelation. Immigrants to the US, it seemed, were expected to mould their speech to match the dominant regional accent—a process that must have required immense effort. I had assumed that linguistic pluralism was a given in all multicultural societies, but my friend’s perspective suggested otherwise.

 

London, a city shaped by migration, had long been relatively tolerant of different English accents. But I suspect this tolerance was largely reserved for speakers from the former British Empire—those who came from the vast network of ex-colonies that once constituted the Commonwealth. The list is extensive: India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, South Africa, Jamaica—the legacy of empire is scattered across the globe.

 

Many who were born in these territories before their independence retained British nationality. I once heard from my mother of an Indian lady at a language school for foreign learners of English who insisted, unequivocally, "I am British." It was a statement of identity, one that carried the weight of history.

 

For Japan, the situation was entirely different. The historical relationship between Britain and Japan was tenuous at best—nothing like the deep colonial entanglements that bound Britain to its former dominions. In the 1980s, many Britons couldn’t even distinguish between Japanese and Hongkongers. Within that context, it was hardly surprising that Japanese-accented English was not particularly well received. It simply did not fit into Britain’s established linguistic order.

 

Now, more than twenty years into the new millennium, I find myself wondering how language is spoken in Britain today. Will I ever return to see it for myself? That remains uncertain. But as I reflect on my time there, I can only hope that London has continued to make space for immigrants to speak freely in English—whatever their accent may be.