My week in Japan gave me a taste of what it would be like to live as an illiterate in a foreign country. You don’t understand directions or guidelines, and even in tourist spots, service personnel seem to vanish after noticing a foreign customer. On the other hand, the nonverbal communication was extremely polite; even train conductors turned twice to bow before exiting the carriage. In the Japan Times, I read that the Japanese language expresses respect and courtesy in many ways: through inflection, word choice, and sentence structures. For example, status and relationship affect verb selection, and the extremely formal keigo business language has a wide range of phrases to exalt others and humble yourself. Both Finnish and English have borrowed many words from Japanese: aikido, bonsai, emoji, futon, judo, haiku, karaoke, karate, kimono, manga, origami, rickshaw, sake, satsuma, shiitake, sudoku, sumo, sushi, tsunami. However, a tourist-san won’t get far in everyday situations with only this vocabulary.