Flier On Subway: Earn Easy Money By Having Japanese People Over For Dinner

The New Yorker reports that Sofia Coppola wasn’t lying about Japanese people being weird:

“Japanese people don’t like to go online and plan their own trips,” Carol Elk said one recent morning at the offices of the Japanese Travel Bureau, on Seventh Avenue. Having worked for two years as a visit coördinator for J.T.B., Elk is familiar with the preferences, and potential disappointments, of the Nikkei-in-New York.

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She went on to detail some imperatives: hotel rooms must have bathtubs and, even for married couples, separate beds; the highest-ranking executive in a business group stays on a higher floor than his subordinates; most museums are “kind of ‘eh,'” but MOMA is popular because it was designed by a Japanese architect; Yankees tickets should be in left field, for optimal viewing of Matsui. Slightly less understandable was a request that Elk says she gets frequently: to have dinner at home with a regular American family. “I tell people, ‘We’ll pay you, we’ll have it catered, we’ll send someone to clean up.’ But nobody will do it in New York.”