MY intention, honest, was not to scar these Japanese kids for life.

And maybe the Japanese Jewish kid as the final backup?

But at the end of the agreed upon half-hour, there were hundreds of smiling Japanese kids still waiting.

"The Japanese kids have this nutty take on culture," she added.

Japanese kids did three hours of math homework a day; ours could barely make change.

"The Japanese kids would bring sushi, and children from the Caribbean might have beef paddies," she said.

"I thought Japanese kids' technical level was higher, but foreign children were more expressive," she said.

I met one of the Japanese kids when we were practicing by the cage, and we shook hands and got our picture taken together.

"Every Japanese kid grows up with this as a bedtime story," he said.

Now, everybody knows that Japanese kids learning to write have to absorb six million characters.