Shortly after she began working at the Hong Kong unit of Nomura Securities Co. in March 1993, Sandra Wu Wen-Hsiu grimaced in pain and said in Japanese to her Japanese boss: "Shamelessness is aching."
The phrase made no sense.
"My boss asked me to say it again, so I did. Then he corrected me," the 39-year-old president of Japan Asia Securities Co. recalled in fluent Japanese. She now knows that the term she had used for "wisdom tooth" should have been "oyashirazu," rather than "hajishirazu."