Sayonara Bites: Saying Thank You for Your Hard Work, the Japanese Way

I ran the words through my mind as I taught the class. The polite Japanese translation of today is my last day, I quit scrolled across my forehead like a TV news ticker. The words streamed as fast as I flipped through the flash cards of English vocabulary. Tutoring a family of five children along with their mother, and occasionally the father, simply became too difficult.

A week earlier, every child gave me a ser