I apologize if this gets posted twice.  My first post doesn't seem to
have made it.

> 
> 
> Because he seems to believe that the problem lies in clerk, not in
> himself. I was curious as to how accurate that assessment might be.
> 
> KWW

As I mentioned before, I tried the best I could.  I even asked if I
could speak English at the start, but the clerk said no.  Had the clerk
spoken slower, it's still debatable whether or not I could have
understood the types of documents needed because a lot of the document
names I had never heard before.  I was just hoping to write them down
phonetically and show a Japanese colleague.  As for asking him to repeat
it slower, I probably said something along the lines of もう一度ゆっくり
お願いします。The clerk repeated the document each time I asked but did
not speak slower (at least in my opinion).

John