Anna Matsushita

  Please forgive this old person for indulging in a little reminiscence. It was more than twenty years ago.   For several years, due to ill health, there was a period when I was unable to work outside the home. Then, fortunately, I happened to find a good doctor, and I finally began to feel that I might be able to return to work.   If I were going to work again, I thought, it might be useful if I could speak at least a little English.   But in those days, there were no video-sharing sites, no social media, and not even internet radio. The only thing I could listen to, more or less, was what was then known as FEN, the radio service for American military personnel stationed in Japan. There were very few opportunities to come into contact with English at home.   So I started looking for somewhere near my home where I could practise speaking English. And that was when I found a teacher offering what was advertised as ‘500-yen English conversati...

  Please listen to this as an old woman’s rambling reminiscence. It happened more than thirty years ago.   For someone like me, who had spent the years from the end of junior high school through high school in Britain, the Japanese university entrance examination system was an entirely unfamiliar world. What worried me most was hearing that the English used in entrance examinations was largely based on American English.   Let me start with the examination itself.   By the time I sat for the entrance examination at my second-choice university, I had already received a rejection from another university. I therefore attended a short summer course offered by a cram school, where I was taught things such as how to write academic essays in Japanese. There, I was told that, although it varied from university to university, American-style English was often used in entrance examinations.   Then came the day of my second university entrance examination. ...