Originally Posted by Shamrock55

I was recently very surprised on a trip back from Japan that there was nobody in the J or PE cabins that could speak Japanese!

The flight was totally full as they usually are from Narita and there were probably only 3 of us in J that were not Japanese. The two FAs that were serving the cabin were speaking really slowly trying to make the poor Japanese understand them, the majority of whom had little to no English. The FA closest to me would just say "Do you want fruuuuuuuit....or graaaaaanoooooolaaaaaaa........or oooommmmletttee". Saying the word in English so slowly obviously wouldn't make any difference if you cant understand the word in the first place. There was obviously a Japanese-speaking FA in Economy as she kept doing the PA announcement but I was surprised nobody up front was dual lingo. Imagine paying so much money for a J ticket then struggling to order your meals. Pretty poor service, but I guess maybe there just wasn't the right crew mix on offer that day. I would have thought they could just at least point to the menu item in Kanji but she didnt seem to want to do that either.