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But he does have some interesting things to say. Perhaps the strangest and most startling thing I ever read about Japanese culture was in his book "NTC Dictionary of Cultural Codewords" which was mercifully renamed and republished under the title "The Japanese Have A Word For It." It's a loose collection of essays rather than a dictionary, it's a catalog of nihonjinron (amongst other topics). There's an entry under the keyword "eigozukai" (english-user) that I'll never forget. He asserted that Japanese believe that Japanese should speak only Japanese, and by learning English, it was believed that their minds would be ruined by foreign and unnatural thinking processes. So eigozukai is an insult, a label for someone who is contaminated and doesn't think like a Japanese. Then he cited an incident from the 1970s in Tokyo, a workman was coming back from his job carrying his toolbox, when he encountered two nihonjin college students speaking English to each other. He took out his axe and murdered one of the eigozukai students on the spot. His defense was that he was driven temporarily insane by hearing nihonjin speaking English to each other..
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