New candidate for the all time greatest English conversation school name

“Cosplish”

Think about it for a little while, then have a look at the clues on where it comes from and what it means as an English language school below:

“Suzuki has a background running maid cafes… Initially, he considered dressing up foreign women as maids and getting them to give English lessons in a place he dreamed of calling Maid in English. But…

…he decided his vision was too narrow. ‘Even though the maid trade within the otaku business seems to be broad-reaching, it’s actually quite narrow. It only caters to otaku who have a thing for the image of maids,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d go for something broader, which would appeal to a wider audience, which is why I decided on the cosplay idea.’”

So, just to make that clear- he thought getting teachers dressing up in maid costumes was wrong, so he decided to get them to dress up in a variety of dodgy cosplay costumes instead… So the name comes from “cosplay” (Japanese English short form of “costume play”, that means all dressing up but is mainly used for anime freaks) plus “English” = “Cosplish”. Genius, although possibly evil genius!

The start of the article goes like this..

“Geek ghetto Akihabara has become the site of Cosplish, Japan’s first English conversation school featuring cosplaying foreigner teachers dressed in wacky costumes, according to Cyzo (April).

Cosplaying teachers are told to teach students how to use simple, “broken” English, while the school also plans to give instructions on “Otaku English,” using mostly abbreviations, and “Anime English,” which will focus on English instructions of famous lines from cartoons like Gundam.

Founder Akihiro Suzuki figured opposites would attract and started Cosplish.

‘Otaku are known for their incredible customer loyalty, while schools are known for their trouble in getting customers to keep on coming back, so I figured a school for cosplayers would achieve the perfect blend,’ Suzuki tells Cyzo.”
And the final flourish/ finishing blow of the article is:
.

‘I want to start classes for kids some time in the future,” Suzuki tells Cyzo. “And I’ll make the teachers get dressed up in Pikachu suits.’”
Best not to get me or anyone else in Japan started on the Japanese English-teacher-as-entertainer/clown thing, so instead I’ll give my pet theory on school names- avoid all school with “Oxford”, “Cambridge”, “Lingua” or “Euro” in the title, plus my latest addition being ones trying to sound sponsored by the Queen (if you’ve been reading recently, I think you know who I mean)

You can read the whole article in Manichi Shimbun, although to be honest it mixed- tickled-and-disgusted me so much I’ve put almost the whole thing above for perhaps the first time on TEFLtastic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 7:04 amand is filed under Japanese education, TEFL, TEFL career planning, Teaching English in Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.