English in Japanese Dramas

I don’t watch many Japanese dramas, but I did manage to catch part of an episode of one called Asakusa Fukumaru Ryokan last week. It is a drama about a Japanese style inn in Tokyo’s Asakusa district and its employees.

It just so happened that the episode I found myself watching was one focusing on a new member of their staff who helps them learn basic English to communicate with their foreign customers. Here’s a clip of some the the English scenes:

The new worker impresses her co-workers when she is able to talk to foreign customers, after which she teaches a few basic phrases to them. I guess a lot of it was meant to be cute comic relief, especially with the one woman who can’t answer the foreigners’ follow-up question. However, if it was kind of painful for me to watch because the actress playing the English-speaking staff member delivered her English lines so badly (would it have been so hard to get one of those foreigners on the set to coach her to speak her lines without the feel of strained reciting of katakana English?).

Later on in the episode she starts getting close to one of the foreign guests, a white guy who can speak Japanese. It looked like some sort of romance was developing between them, and the other Japanese characters seemed to have nothing but positive things to say about it. Having my fill of drama for the day, I ended up changing the channel before the episode was over.