Li Yang seems an unlikely proselytizer for internationalism through English language study. Not only is he not a native speaker of English, but prior to last week he had never even set foot outside of mainland China.
Japan is the first stop on his Millennium Tour of Asia, mainly because filmmaker Zhang Yuan's documentary about Li and his Crazy English lectures opens in Japan later this month. In fact, he held a Crazy English lecture at Yasuda Seimei Hall in Shinjuku on the day he arrived.
"I heard it's difficult to get Japanese people to open their mouths," Li told me in his room at the Arimax Hotel in Shibuya. Li's lectures are part encounter sessions, part standup comedy routines, and require of his audience a lot of yelling and "losing face."