Well , we did these lectures and they seemed to go well, and then Takeda said, ‘Would you teach them to speak English properly?’ Well, I felt less comfortable about this because it’s not my area of expertise, but he was thinking of something more basic. It’s interesting about how meticulous Japanese are... if you’re speaking English you speak it properly and you learn the correct way of doing things.

So the first thing was the names of the elements – how do you pronounce them? So we went through that and I immediately came up against a difficulty. The Japanese and their courtesies... one of the things is, you must not show your tongue. Well, of course, you and I would not go to someone like that, that would be rude of course.

But in English, as you know, there are many sounds which you can’t make without using the tongue and your lips. And so, ‘though’ and ‘thou’ and ‘thither’, not that they were words that I was teaching them, you need to show the tongue.

Now we got to thorium and they said torium so I said, no you put your tongue out, thorium. Great surprise, so they would say thorium, and whenever there was a ‘th’, thorium, thallium, up would come the hand. It’s an interesting cultural thing that is a difficulty that one wouldn’t suspect perhaps until you had met it.