This photo has a story. I was walking in Meiji Park when I had the sense that I was surrounded. Yee, I was in a ring of schoolgirls in uniform, maybe 14 years old.

A tall girl, probably the boldest one, came up to me and asked if she could talk with me. She spoke something like English, but I could not understand any of her sentences. I looked around and saw a young man, who appeared to be their teacher. He is at the right in this photo.

We tried to converse. That did not work, either. I took this photo of a few of the girls, and we went our separate ways.

Later, it occurred to me that they were speaking what you might look on as a dialect of English - one found in Japanese classrooms. They could understand each other in the classroom, but they had no contact with real English speakers. Some of them, like the young man, grew up to teach English to the next generation of students.