Stood at the smoking area on a hot Saturday afternoon, vape in hand, ice-cold beer sweating through the can, shooting the shit with my American mate. This is the one good thing. This is the entire point of the day. And then I clock him. The broken English conversation in Japan has a specific overture, and I can hear it warming up across the tarmac.

He arrives quietly. He always arrives quietly. He stands a touch too close, fishes out a cigarette, sparks the bloody thing up, and stares into the middle distance with the studied nonchalance of a man who absolutely is not about to talk to us and absolutely is about to talk to us. You can feel it building. The air thickens. Kuuki you'd better be reading, and the kuuki says: incoming.

He gets to the business end of his cigarette. He summons the courage of a man storming a beach. And out it comes, the opening salvo, the great unkillable gambit:

"YOU ARE FROM?"

There it fucking is. Two words, no verb, delivered at the volume of a tannoy announcement, as though we are not eighteen inches away but signalling across a fucking valley. And here is where the seasoned resident makes his choice. You can flail about in broken English and watch the whole thing curdle into a ten-minute hostage negotiation, or you can be kind to everyone involved and answer in fluent Japanese. So we answer in Japanese. Politely. Properly. The way you'd answer anyone.

The conversation where nothing you say lands

What follows is the most beautifully pointless exchange known to man. He asks in broken English. We respond in fluent Japanese. He asks the next thing in broken English. We respond, again, in completely serviceable, grammatically intact, accent-appropriate Japanese. This goes on. And on. The man is receiving full, coherent answers in his own bloody language and his brain has filed them under "noise the foreigner makes." Because the script in his head was written before we arrived and there is no input that will overwrite it.

You could recite the Tale of Genji back to him in flawless classical Japanese and he'd nod, take a drag, and ask where you keep your passport. The tatemae is airtight. There is the foreigner-shaped slot, and into that slot goes "speaks English, struggles with chopsticks, cannot possibly," and no amount of evidence, however fluent, however sustained, is permitted to dislodge it. It is the single most exhausting magic trick in this country: the ability to look directly at a thing happening and not see it.

Ten minutes of this. Ten fucking minutes. My beer's gone warm. My mate's doing the thousand-yard stare. We have answered, in Japanese, questions about where we live, how long we've been here, what we do, and whether we like natto. All in Japanese. Every word of it.

And then, the gentleman, having absorbed exactly none of it, lowers his cigarette, looks at us with the dawning wonder of a man discovering fire, and asks:

"Can you speak a the Japanese?"

For fuck's sake.

The slot you will die in

This is the bit they don't tell you. Ten years. Eleven. You can file every form, learn every honorific, read the kuuki like a bloody barometer, and you will still be standing in a smoking area on a Saturday being asked, in broken English, whether you can do the thing you have been visibly doing for the last ten minutes. The fluency is not a key. It does not open the door. There is no door. There is a slot, and you are in it, and you will be in it when they bury you.

The maddening part isn't the question. It's that there's no malice in it, which is somehow worse, because you can't even be properly furious at the bloke. He's lovely. He's a harmless old git having a fag and a chat. The contempt belongs upstairs, to the whole gormless national script that hands every well-meaning pensioner the same two lines and lets them perform them at you forever, regardless of what you say back. Absolute clowns, all of them, for keeping the script in print.

So I smiled. I said hai, chotto dake, a little bit. Because the honest answer, mate, the honne, is: better than you, and it changed nothing, and it never will.

Lovely beer though.