When Tsutomu Toyama first read Barack Obama's November victory speech, he was deeply impressed, both by the choice of language and the message conveyed.
"The vocabulary Obama used was not very difficult and his message was very clear," said Toyama, an English teacher at Aletheia Shonan High School in Kanagawa Prefecture.
"I felt that he structured the speech in a way that everyone in the 'melting pot' could understand. It was also interesting that he used 'we' as the subject rather than 'I,' " he said.