English Discush.

"In most countries, women outlive men by an average of 5-6 years. Why is this?". This is the question I posed to my English conversation class tonight.

Takao, the sixty-something-year-old retired math teacher and the most fluent in our class, responded immediately: "It's because women are physically stronger. I'm not talking about muscles! I'm talking about the physical capacity to endure."

I asked him why he thought that?

"Well, take child birth, for example! There's NO WAY I could do that! There's a saying that, wait, what is it... there's a saying that says giving birth to a child is like pushing a watermelon out of your nostril." To which Yoshie, mother of 3 adult sons, expressed some doubt: "It's not quite like that..." and Kimie, recent grandmother, laughed outright said she'd never heard of that saying before.

I wondered aloud whether women have healthier lifestyles than men, and thus live healthier, longer lives? For example, don't men usually drink and smoke more than women? Nay, said Takao (who does not drink, but whose wife does).

Twenty-something-year-old Rie said it's because women handle stress better. She said that women have more flexible minds and can think about many things at once; "if something bothers us, we just drop it and move on."

At this seventy-something-year-old Inoue, he of the massive English written compositions (see December 13 2007 post), said:

"I will tell you the correct answer.[much laughter from the group] It's because God ordered women to live longer so that they can care for their husbands."

To which Rie said, "Well, widows do seem happy." [lots of laughter]