2003 March 21: "light up". This is a term applied to a building which is illuminated with decorative lights to make its shape apparent at night. This is an item of Japanese English which Japanese people not uncommonly believe to be standard English.

2003 March 21: "level up". This is used to mean "go up one grade". It is a piece of Japanese English which creeps into the spoken English of Japanese students, e.g. "I want to level up" (meaning, for example, "I want to go up to the next grade in this English school.")

2003 February 13: "guardman". This is Japanese English for "security guard". As an English teacher who teaches business English, I sometimes find myself in the position of having to establish the difference between a security company (which has security guards) and a securities company (which does high-powered stuff in the financial sector). If you can clearly and reliably do this inside of twenty seconds (which is all it takes once you know how) then you can call yourself a professional English teacher. (Unfortunately, I'm not at liberty to explain how this is done, as it's a trade secret.)

2003 February 12: "at mark". This is the standard Japanese term for the "@" mark which crops up in e-mail addresses. Japanese students are typically convinced that "at mark" is standard English, and it can take a certain amount of work to unconvince them. In Japanese, an e-mail address like "pig@bacon.com" would sound something like "piggu atto makku baakon dotto com."

2003 February 11: "raja". This cropped up on some kind of TV drama which had something to do with space shuttles and outer space. I was told that this word is English and means "yes", which enabled me to figure out that it's a Japanese version of "roger".

2003 February 07: "skinship", sometimes written "skin ship". I've been noticing this in students' written work recently, and it's also come up a couple of times in face to face conversation. Students seem to think that this is an English word, but it's not. I thought it might be some new piece of North American slang, but when I did an Internet search I didn't find any native speakers of English using it. "Skinship" does crop up on the Internet, but the English-language sites on which it appears seem to have been constructed by Japanese people. It's hard to say what "skinship" means, but I think it means something like "making social contact with people by touching them". This is the kind of term that can be a real problem for an English teacher: something that looks as if it should be English, something that the students are convinced is English, but which actually is most definitely not English.

2003 January 01: "miss" - romanized as "misu" but generally pronounced "miss," the terminal vowel elided. Seen on TV today. This commonly used piece of Japanese English means "mistake," and is in fact formed by taking the English word "mistake" and sawing off the end of it, which is extremely painful for the word, although none of those responsible ever show the slightest sign of guilt.

2002 December 25: "Christmas" - romanized as "kurisumasu". On the 25th, however, an NHK announcer managed a perfect "st" combination to make the sound of the English word "Christmas". The NHK announcer also came out with what sounded, to my ear, like a perfectly English "Christmas Eve". (NHK is Japan's state-supported broadcasting service, similar to America's PBS or Britain's BBC. Like those organizations, NHK coexists with private enterprise broadcasting services.)

Spotted 2002 December 17: "traceability". (I'm not sure how this is supposed to be romanized.) Because of concerns about food safety, steps have been taken to ensure the (theoretical) "traceability" of vegetables and so forth. Context: TV documentary. I don't believe I've ever encountered the word "traceability" anywhere in the English language. Nevertheless, to my mind, this does seem like a logical, natural and well-formed English word.