“Did you get that memo?”

A teacher calls my name. “Nicole-san, do you have any fusen?” he asks me in rapid, whirlwind Japanese. I look back with a glazed, puzzled look.

“Sorry?”

“‘use. ‘usen. fusen. fu-se-nn.”

The words tumble out of his mouth and I peer back at him utterly stumped, eyes narrowed in profound bewilderment. His pronunciation is never as clear as the artificial-sounding-Japanese podcasts or CDs that I listen to every once in a while. I also never see his teeth. His mouth wobbles and indistinctly annunciates his words so that up until maybe a week ago I wasn’t even sure that he had any.

We sit there staring at each other for a good three minutes, as I mispronounce the deceptively simple word back to him with the worldwide-understood rising intonation that indicates a question, each time hoping that I’ve gotten it right. He chuckles and slows down the elementary three syllable word so that my sluggardly ears and deteriorating brain can attempt to make out the proper spelling and pronunciation.

It’s not a word that’s in my lamentable vocabulary. I’ve never heard it before in my life.

“Sorry. I have no clue what you’re on about,” I respond in sorrowful Japanese.

Being a teacher, he is eager to attempt to help my comprehension. He bustles over to his desk overflowing with files, books and random papers, and begins yanking out various drawers in a doomed search for this elusive “fusen.” In an effort to help I begin naming random office supplies in the hopes that something will trigger his memory. “Paper clips?” “Push pins?” “Markers?” “Glue stick?” I run down the aisle of a Staples retail store in my mind snatching things off the shelves and shoving them under his nose in the hopes of approval. He indicates the size and shape with his hands, but this does little to help either of us. And I begin to wonder why he is scouring his desk looking for something we both know perfectly well he doesn’t have. He was out of them to begin with which is what prompted this pickle of a predicament.

Finally, he gives up. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he says and mystified we both admit defeat.

“Hey, Sensei, do you have any fusen?” he calls over to another teacher.

“Fusen? Yup.”

The teacher tosses something over. It’s nothing more than a mere post-it. Not a true, genuine, note-size post-it note, but one of the baby ones that one might use to book mark a page or separate documents. Invented by Art Fry (no relation to the marvelous Stephen Fry, as far as I know), who wanted a bookmark that wouldn’t fall out of his hymn book, the Post-it has been helping the religious ever since and has gone on to gain international fame as well as the name of “fusen” or simply “tag” or “label.” You’d think for something like that they would have utilized katakana, but no, there’s kanji too, which is quite possibly the most complicated way to write Post-it that one could imagine: 附箋 .