The Foreign Girl Can Not Be Understood!

Today’s UN Training ---- Master the art of ‘Communication’

The main rung of the ladder to the top of the world is the ability for a person to communicate with another. In a lot of ways, diplomacy and the skill of communication are one in the same, but in a very specific way they're two separate sides of the same coin.

Diplomacy is a method used to get desired results for either the person themselves, or the institution they represent.

Communication is for the other person’s benefit.

As self-serving as politics is, there is at least the bare minimum of serving one’s constituents after all, and the politician must be able to communicate with them.

Despite his shady nature, Tani believes that this is perhaps his greatest ability, the fact that he can fluently speak 6 languages means he has the ability to speak to billions of people across the world at any given time. He spent countless hours studying and training to get to this point at such a young age because the thought of being able to do that was the most appealing part of his dream in the beginning.

But once he felt like he truly succeeded in his ability to communicate, he started to hone the ruthless aspects of his dreams and steadily became more jaded. Thus the monster that is Akihiro Tani was created.

Maybe, just maybe, through the course of the more obscene studies into the world of politics, he actually lost the ability to communicate? What better way to test that out than by taking a step back down to the rung of the ladder he had already passed.

After all, the fulfillment and happiness of whoever ends up joining his club rides on it.

--------------------------------

It would seem that the students of the other clubs have settled in, the once rousing atmosphere has quieted some, and the signs of life echoing in the halls has presented itself in a steady murmur.

Feeling a little less threatened by the noise, he sighs. Even though he didn’t gain a member on his first day, he at least got some answers. Wakanda-sensei carelessly allowed Tani’s poster to be buried on the bulletin board, and Shirai-sensei either forgot to promote for him, or had wanted to make sure she’ll get her daily treats out of him before putting in work. Both of those explanations mean that there is still a chance his club will be enticing to other students once they find out that it exists.

It would have been much worse had the teachers promoted the club just like he wanted and still no one showed up; he’s not confident that he could have been able to solve such a devastating problem if that turned out to be the case.

Reaching his clubroom, he notices the door slightly ajar.

Thinking he may have left it that way when he rushed out to investigate the two teachers, he makes nothing of it.

Walking into the room, the first thing he notices is that the late afternoon sunlight shines directly through the window and slightly stings his eyes, so he lifts his hand to shield himself from the sudden assault of light.

The second thing he notices is a breeze that flies through the windows and caresses his face.

The last thing he notices… is a girl repositioning the chair he had knocked over earlier.

“..?”

It takes a brief moment for his eyes to adjust, and when they do, he’s assured that the painted orange hue of the room isn’t playing tricks on them.

There actually is a girl in his clubroom.

Her gold tinted hair gently flowing in the wind dances in front of him in a way that slows time itself.

The sunlight seems to refract off her honey golden eyes, bending itself into a color similar to flickering gold coins in a stream of water.

He has never seen anyone like her before, and he’s left speechless when they exchange glares.

She greets him with a warm smile befitting of the glistening aura that surrounds her.

His legs respond to such a magnificent sight by wobbling for a moment.

This person in front of him is special, and he immediately knows it.

He’s never felt this way in his life, it’s as if his very soul has been caressed into the bosom of an angel.

Feeling heat in the tips of his ears comes as a reminder that he has allowed himself to be lost in her sudden appearance.

This could only mean one thing…

“My first member!!”

Not for one second did those sensations register as anything other than selfish elation for the arrival of someone wanting to join his club.

He rushes to her, fervently shakes her hands and begins to speed talk.

“Welcome to the Languages club! Allow me to make you some tea! Oh, how rude of me to not already have it out. You see, it got cold when I was waiting for someone to show up, ahaha.”

Tani rushes to a cabinet and pulls out a kettle, filling it with a water bottle. He hastily shuffles through the drawers of the room, pulling out a box of tea bags and cups while the water boils.

The way he fumbles around making a mess of things like napkins and straws is out of character for him, but he can’t contain his excitement. At this moment, the emotion of embarrassment is as distant for him as it was for the members of the baseball team shouting out their team’s chants in the courtyard earlier in the day.

With just a little bit of excitement, and a lot of relief, he became just like them.

“Here you go!”

He slides the tea cup on the table towards her.

“I forgot to introduce myself! My name is Akihiro Tani, I am the founder of the club and it’ll be my pleasure to help you with your language needs.”

Without even looking her way, he runs to the helm of the U shaped table, grabs a piece of paper from a neatly stacked pile and presents it to her.

“If you can do me a favor and just sign right here please.”

It’s the application form to join his club, and he’s trying to pressure her into signing it without reading through the fine print with the tactics of a used car salesman.

“....”

She’s silent, but still smiling.

If Tani were paying attention he’d see that above that smile, her eyebrows are scrunched up nervously as though she has no idea what is going on.

But Tani simply pushes the paper closer to her in response to her hesitation.

“Ah I get it, you don’t have a pen. One second.”

With the briskness of a ninja, he pulls out a pen and delicately puts it into her hand.

This prompts her to look at the full page of Japanese print presented to her that looks like a corporate culture essay above a dotted line at the bottom.

She squeezes the pen in her palm and looks up at Tani and back down to the form multiple times in rapid succession.

She then postures up as if realizing she is being asked to do something, and she writes down her signature with no sign of feeling threatened by how suspicious Tani had been acting.

No sooner than the pen leaves the paper, Tani grabs it and rushes to the door.

“Just a moment, I’ll be right back!”

She didn't even get a chance to reply before he took off.

The golden haired girl is left in the orange hued room blinking her eyes after his swift exit.

Not one to let a moment of doubt slip into a mark’s head, Tani sprints to Shirai-sensei’s classroom and hands in the application form before darting right back out into the hallway.

There’s no turning back for the girl now, he purposefully chose not to explain to her what the club was about and rushed her into becoming an official member.

Tani has won a great battle and his gait carries the exultancy of a Roman general on parade.

He re-enters his clubroom looking three times bigger than he was when he left. Confident that he has secured at least the first aspect of his ideal future, he can slide right back into his usual callous self.

“Now then,” Pushing up his glasses, the sun reflects off the lenses as he intentionally strikes a pose like a character in a shounen manga. “Let’s go over what I expect of you.”

Those words were intentionally firm to the point of intimidation. He halfway expects to see the girl in front of him tremble at the declaration.

But to his surprise, she is still sending the same smile his way.

“Huh?”

With the return of his confidence comes the return of perception, and it’s only now that he notices something strange about the girl.

He can’t believe he didn’t have the wherewithal to see it before.

He was so entrenched in his reverie that he never paid attention to the uniquely delicate features of her feminine face.

“You’re a gaijin? Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting that.”

Tani had hoped that Japanese students would join his club, and that teaching them foreign languages would bolster his portfolio and help him gain admission into TIU.

But having one member from abroad can be used to his advantage, this girl can easily help him work with a Japanese student looking to learn her native tongue, especially if she’s English or American. She might just become his co-captain in the club’s operations and make his work twice as simple.

Thinking about how much she can benefit him, a smile of a schemer shows up on his face when he asks,

“What’s your name?”

“....”

“Your name?” he repeats.

“....”

She doesn’t respond to him, she just looks at him as though she can’t understand what he’s asking of her.

“You couldn’t possibly be unable to speak Japanese?” he asks with a tremor in his voice.

“Uh… What’s your name?” he asks in English.

“....”

Now she looks confused, and he can see her start to squirm.

“You don’t even know English??”

She shakes her head from left to right.

“Pray tell me this is a joke!"

English is the most spoken language in the world. As a foreigner, she would have to have been living under a rock somewhere to not even know a little bit of it.

“Where are you from?” he asks in French.

“....”

“Are you from Italy?” he asks in Italian.

She shakes her head, she can at least understand that he mentioned a country.

“Germany? Spain??”

“....”

“China!?”

She’s obviously not Chinese, he’s just desperate.

She holds her finger up to stop Tani from rattling off any more countries.

For a brief moment, this gesture comes as a relief. He assumes he must not have given her enough time to answer whether she’s from Germany or Spain. He can speak German and Spanish, and can manage his way around her inability to speak Japanese so long as he can at least communicate with her in one of the six languages he knows.

“Jeg er fra Norge.” she declares.

Her voice sounded as angelic as she looked when she said that.

But to Tani, whatever in the world she just told him sounded as rough and unintelligible as a tire screech.

She exists outside of the depth of knowledge he has spent countless hours immersed in. She is an anomalous beast that doesn’t belong on any rung of his ladder to success. In fact, she could very well be the ax that topples the whole thing to the ground.

He can not communicate with her.

“Uhh.. ummm.” Tani stammers, his once hardened frame cracks and folds into itself. “Excuse me for one moment!”

He darts out of the room so fast it leaves behind a wind trail.

Again the girl is left alone in the clubroom blinking, perplexed by what is happening.

“I gotta get rid of her! There’s no way I can run a Languages club with a member I can’t even talk to!” he says to himself while rushing through the hallway with the speed of an olympic sprinter.

Reaching Shirai-sensei’s classroom, he roughly slides open the door in a loud thud.

“Shirai-sensei! I need that application form back!”

He intends to rip up the contract the foreign girl had just signed and restart from scratch.

There’s only one problem.

Shirai-sensei is gone.

So gone in fact, Tani thinks he can already see cobwebs forming on her desk.

“But how can she be ‘that’ gone already?? I was just here like two minutes ago!!”

With no way to get that form back before it’s officially submitted, Tani has been defeated.

He dejectedly makes his way back to his clubroom, peeks his head through the doorway to see if the foreign girl is still there, and sighs before slinking his way back inside.

With his head hung low, the girl gently pushes a piece of paper into his chest.

“What’s this? A note?”

She nods, urging him to grab it.

Upon opening it up, his eyes widen when he sees the Japanese handwriting.

“It’s from Principal Togashi?”

Knowing that the girl in front of him can’t understand a word he says, Tani begins reading aloud.

“Akihiro-kun, I would like to introduce you to Anita Pedersen, Kokusai’s newest foreign exchange student from Norway. As I’m sure you’ve already found out, Anita-san is unable to speak any language other than her own, which poses quite the problem for myself and our teaching staff. Since we don’t have any specialized courses to cater to her needs, I took it upon myself to volunteer our greatest student to help handle her day to day activities. As the genius leader of a new club specifically created to handle the intricacies of interlingual communication, I am certain that you of all people are willing and able to help Anita-san get through her senior year here at school.”

Tani is gripping the paper so hard his knuckles are white.

An image of a flustered Principal Togashi hawking the problem that is this girl off to him as a way of revenge for the blackmail pops into his mind and he seethes.

“Why would they accept someone into this school that they can’t even teach?? Ha! He really thinks that I’ll just go along with his mistake when I’m the one with all the power in this situation. I’ll send out that video to the faculty so fast his head will spin.”

Voicing his protest affords him a brief respite from his anger. He looks back down on the letter with an arrogant smile and continues reading.

“I bet at this moment, you’re thinking about how you’d sooner release my toilet video before agreeing to such a daunting request. So I feel I should let you know that this project has been presented to Dr. Mizuno Arai, the head of admissions at Tokyo International University. I know that you know who he is, but what you probably don’t know is that he’s actually a good friend of mine, we’ve spent a lot of time together in the educational field as upstanding citizens. He and the rest of the academic board of TIU are excited to see the genius of Akihiro Tani in action, they are very interested in the Languages club, and I will be providing them with updates on Anita’s progress. I’m sure it will play a big part in whether they think you’re bright enough to become the head of the Model UN in college.”

Tani gasps for air and writhes.

The Principal is more villainous than Tani ever gave him credit for, he has inserted himself directly into Tani’s future as a foil by creating a problem that would take a miracle to solve.

At the very bottom of the letter in a postscript, the Principal left a parting message that confirms his intention.

“There’s a code that the world abides by that you and I must follow as well. It’s called Mutually Assured Destruction. If you’re going to hold the key to my reputation in your hands, I will have the key to your life goal in mine. I wish you luck, Akihiro-kun, the future of humanity is at stake!”

The sarcastic insult added at the end of the letter triggers Tani's reflex to squeeze the paper in his hand and shove the wad into his pocket.

He looks at the girl, and she’s cluelessly smiling back at him as though she assumes the letter that the Principal had her give to him was just a friendly introduction. This smiling foreigner is completely oblivious to the wrench in his plans she has just become.

“Anita Pederson!” She says, holding out her hand to the agitated boy in front of her. “Hyggelig a mote deg!”

Even though he can safely assume that she just introduced herself, he cringes at the fact he didn’t understand exactly how she did it.

But despite that, he manages to ease his resentment of the situation he’s found himself in with a deescalating sigh.

Our resident high schooler may be quickly triggered to frustration, he may be cold and callous to those around him, he may even just be a monster. But he is most certainly not a quitter. Just because there’s an added obstacle that came out of nowhere doesn’t mean he won’t do whatever it takes to overcome it.

If the Principal thinks the arrival of Anita Pederson is enough to sway Tani’s determination to accomplish his dream, he wasn’t listening when Tani said he would do absolutely anything to make it happen.

With that in mind, he shakes her hand.

“My name is Akihiro Tani… I’m going to teach you how to speak Japanese!”

The challenge has been accepted.

The Languages Club has its first member.

Today’s UN Lesson --- Tani can’t communicate!!