Surviving a Yakuza's wife.

 I bet the title has you intrigued. Be patient, all will be revealed, in due course.

I was married to a lovely Japanese woman for 20 years, before she had enough. Strangely, she is still great friends with my current wife and me. I'm very happy about that. Having said all that, I moved to Japan in  1996 for a year, supposedly to learn more about the culture and the language.

I absolutely loved the country and the people. So much so, i took a job as an English teacher with the largest language school in Japan and spent 7 years there, until home sickness got the better of me. I remember getting off the plane in Cairns and immediately wanted to reboard it back to Japan. All this, while having a heart attack. A bit weird, huh?

OK, now to the Yakuza thing.

At the school where I was teaching, apart from classroom lessons, there was a conversation lounge, where students could practice their English, with a teacher moderating. The lounge was a large room, seating about 20 students on casual sofas and the moderating teacher changed every 40 minutes. It was very popular with the students.

One day, a new student was in the room. She was in her early 50s, spoke good English and was wearing that much gold and diamond bling, her knuckles almost dragged on the ground. She was a very pleasant person and introduced herself as Meko, or that's what I heard. I was quite new to Japan then, so I wasn't very familiar with Japanese names. You can see what's coming, can't you?

As with all new students, I tried to encourage her to speak, frequently referring to her by name. During this time, her face became darker and darker and it wasn't difficult to see her anger. Fortunately the bell rang to signal it was time to change teacher, so I fled the room.

I was followed out by one of my regular students who pulled me aside and asked if I knew why the new student was angry. I told her I had no idea and asked her why, She asked me what the student's name was.

 I replied, "Meko". She said the student's name was Mieko, not Meko. She then asked if I knew the meaning of meko. I shook my head. she then told me it was one of several rude slang words for vagina. I had just spent 40 minutes calling the new student the "c" word. Then she told me the zinger. Mieko was the wife of one of the biggest Yakuza bosses in Nara Prefecture. The term, "I crapped my pants", almost took on the literal meaning.

Self preservation reared its ugly head, so I waited for Mieko to leave the conversation room and approached her and immediately apologised. I explained how I was new to Japan and was unaware of my mistake, until after I had left the room. She was a very gracious woman and told me that she had guessed as much and, to my embarrassment, she told me how her and the other students had laughed about it

She often came back to the conversation lounge, after that incident and, I'm happy to say, we became great friends,

The downside was that, after that day, whenever a new student came into the conversation lounge, while I was there, they always wrote that student's name on the whiteboard. They obviously shared the story for years.