Jim Breen <jimbreen@gmail.com> wrote:
> mtfester@netMAPSONscape.net wrote:
> > I've lost count of the number of people I've met who were stationed in 
> > Japan but can't even speak the most rudimentary Japanese.

> My experience has been the opposite - most US ex-military people
> I have met who were stationed in Japan could speak Japanese and
> had kept up an involvment with Japan. Of course, that doesn't
> conflict with Mike's observation because I only met them through
> a mutual engagement with Japan and Japanese. (Another example of
> why you can't generalize from small biassed samples. Mike, of
> course, meets vastly more Americans than I do, and is in a position
> to generalize.)

One of the exceptions to my observation was actually my first Japanese
teacher. He was in Japan during the Occupation, and became so 
fascinated with the culture that he took it upon himself to 
study the language independently. He became head of the Japanese
program at UCLA.

Mike