Our crack reporter finds himself the guest of honor at a party with models from the Tokyo Auto Salon.

Some of SoraNews24 Japanese-language correspondent Mr. Sato’s assignments are…unpleasant. In the course of his duties, he’s visited Japan’s cave of death, blasted his junk with chemical cooling spray, slept on the street, and hand-assembled a cardboard toilet.

Still, it’s not like Mr. Sato risks his life, comfort, or sanity every single day at work. Once a year, Mr. Sato gets a reprieve from his work-related hardships when he heads to the Tokyo Auto Salon car tuning convention and photographs the event’s beautiful booth models. The memory of that day usually has to sustain his spirits until the next year, but recently something unexpected happened.

At the 2018 Auto Salon, Mr. Sato stopped by the booth for Army Girl, a fashion lifestyle brand that was displaying two customized Porsches presented by seven spokesmodels. While many admirers were happy to simply snap photos from afar, Mr. Sato asked if he could pose for a group shot with the team, a request they cordially obliged him.

After several weeks of fondly reminiscing about this happy moment, Mr. Sato was surprised when he suddenly received a phone call from Army Girl company president Hitoshi Hoshino at the office. “The models are going out for dinner and drinks to celebrate wrapping up the Auto Salon,” Hoshino told Mr. Sato. “Would you like to join them?”

▼ “Would I…”

▼ “…like to go drinking with them?”

▼ “Why yes, yes I would.”

And so, in the pursuit of journalistic integrity, Mr. Sato found himself outside a teppanyaki flat grill restaurant in Tokyo’s fashionable Roppongi district. It was just the sort of place he imagined groups of models go out to dinner together at…”imagined” being the key word, as this was his first experience with such rarefied dining company.

Waiting for him inside a private room with traditional tatami reed floor mats were Erika Tusji, Mai Godo, Asami Ota, Chimu Ikuta, Mana Shibasaki, Erena Koizumi, and Karen Tachibana.

The ladies gave Mr. Sato a warm welcome, and he took his seat, forced his facial muscles into the most dapper visage he could manage, and raised a glass of white wine for the opening kampai toast.

But then disaster struck. See, aside from his annual trip to the Auto Salon, Mr. Sato’s job has him spending more time around strange men than beautiful women, so he’s not all that accustomed to close-quarters conversations with the fairer sex. After everyone had taken a sip of their drinks, one of Mr. Sato’s dining companions said “Thank you for joining us tonight.”

And while our reporter would have liked to offer a suave response, what came out of his mouth instead was:

“Ababababbabbaabbabababbabbababbababbabababbabababa.”

Although Mr. Sato assures us he can maintain his eloquence even when in the company of as many as six attractive women, seven beauties was apparently beyond even his capabilities, frying his brain and tying his tongue so badly that the best he could initially manage was good-natured gibberish. Luckily for him, the rest of the group was made up of far more polished conversationalists, and they patiently waited for him to recover his mental bearings, and eventually they all entered into an animated and enjoyable discussion of Mr. Sato’s continuing quest to become a better pole dancer.

So what can we learn from all this? If you’re going to a dinner party where you’ll be meeting lots of new people, it’s probably not a bad idea to think of an interesting story or anecdote to share beforehand. And should you get tongue-tied, just remember Mr. Sato’s sage advice: “Ababababbabbaabbabababbabbababbababbabababbabababa.”

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