Recently, I received some letters from readers criticizing me for making fun of Japanese English. These people said that this kind of humor has been "played to death" and, moreover, that Japanese English is "not interesting." Ha!

All I can say is that as long as there is humor out there, people will laugh. And as long as I am an English teacher in Japan, I will police the language and hand out violations to English abusers. After all, if we ignore Japanese English, thus accepting its, ahem, "peculiarities," where does one draw the line?

Is it OK that one of my students recommends a certain cafe for its "strawberry snort cake?" Hmm. Another student wrote that she went to Sapporo and ate famous "Sapporo needles!" Oh, but she's just a student, you say. But no! She's planning on becoming a translator. And such spelling mistakes slip into tourist brochures all the time. Call me a stickler, but if the Sapporo Visitors Bureau starts advertising its needles, stomachs from all over the world are going to be in stitches.