Although caucasian, I speak passable Japanese, but often thats not enough. In my experience, to the extent any thing, title, facility, store, etc. exists, you typically have to be able to refer to something by exactly the term that they know it as. The corrolary is the way many of the staff have trouble during irregular ops, esp in those airports where they use contract staff rather than employees of the airlines themselves. They can do regular ops "by rote" ok, but any question or request that takes them out of that element they can't usually deal with.

[This message has been edited by unagi1 (edited 07-23-2001).]