“It’s an old Confucian idea that the teacher is almost infallible, so whatever comes out of the teacher's mouth is truth, and the students are just there to kind of absorb, never question, just get the wisdom that's emanating from the teacher,” Nicholas Bradley told the Lions.

He said this makes it a challenge for the teacher in Japan to get class discussions going. “If we have seminars, I want disagreement, and sometimes I'll even, for example, put forward a controversial idea or something I know is wrong, and I want the students to kind of argue against it or back. They won’t. They'll just kind of absorb it as truthful,” Bradley said.

This tendency also arises in meetings among adults, Bradley said.  If a Lions Club meeting were to talk place in Japan, there would likely be no questions for the guest speaker.

Bradley is from the county of Yorkshire in England and his hometown, he said, is “next to” the city of Leeds (most famous perhaps in America for being the location where a live The Who album was recorded) which is 40 miles from Manchester, the nearest metropolitan city.  But he has not lived in England since beginning to teach in Japan at the Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. 

“English is one of the main subjects,” Bradley said.  “I teach social studies, various subjects when needed, cultural studies, history. One of my main subjects is history, of course, language, and academic writing. … I supervise the foreign lecturers at the university.”

Right now Bradley is residing in Hope. He and his wife, from Dallas, Texas and working at a hospital in Magnolia, chose to buy a house here because of the scenery and the small-town culture. “We were looking at places to live and thinking about what we wanted. We have certain checklist [items], like space, natural beauty, some of these things, relaxed quality of life, nice community,” he said.

Bradley said he likes that it takes very little time to get from place to place in Hope, which is in contrast to the twenty-minute walk to catch one train, then a switch to another that it takes over a total 90-minute commute to his workplace in Nagoya. 

Bradley had his own question for the Lions, how to get into a soccer game with adults. He was advised to come out to the Fair Park soccer fields on weekend afternoons.