A washroom in a small guesthouse. Late. Somebody has printed a card, laminated it, and stood it up next to the basin.
水道の水は飲むことができます。
This tap water is able to drink
Photograph. Post. Past six million views by the next afternoon, and underneath it, in both languages, the same take several hundred times: this is what happens when English teachers can't speak English.
The man who posted it did not say that. His caption said the opposite — that looking at this and concluding Japanese English teachers lack English is wrong. He is right, and the reason is far more interesting than the joke.
Start with what is actually broken, because it is worth being precise about. Be able to takes a subject that can perform the verb. The card gives it water. English, read strictly, therefore reports that the tap water is capable of drinking — that it has a mouth, and a thirst, and is presumably working through a glass of something right now. Every native speaker registers this in about a fifth of a second, laughs, and moves on. Almost none of them can tell you what the writer actually did wrong, which is the part that matters.
So look at the Japanese, because the Japanese is not clumsy. 水道の水は飲むことができます is a perfect sentence. It is what any hotel in the country would print. The entire problem is hiding in the second character, は — and は is not a subject marker. It is a topic marker, and Japanese has no equivalent obligation to name a subject at all.
That sentence does not say "the water can drink". It says something closer to: regarding the tap water — drinking is possible. Who is drinking? Unstated. You, anyone, people in general, whoever happens to be standing at that sink. Japanese has told you what the sentence is about and considers the rest of the bookkeeping your business. This is not a loophole or a shortcut. It is how the language is built, from the first sentence a child speaks to the last line of a legal contract.
Then the translation happens, and English has exactly one slot to put a topic into: the grammatical subject, at the front. And English subjects are agents — they do things. The instant 水 lands in that slot, English hands it a mouth. The mistake is not vocabulary, and it is not a missing lesson. It is that the two languages fundamentally disagree about what the first word of a sentence is for, and that disagreement outlives ten years of study, three textbooks, and a year abroad.
Here is the part that makes it genuinely painful, and it is the reason nobody in that comment section is entitled to feel clever. English has this construction. English does it constantly. This water is safe to drink. This book is easy to read. The soup is ready to eat. That chair is comfortable to sit in. The thing being acted on climbs into the subject slot, everyone understands perfectly, and not one person suspects the book of reading. Linguists call it tough-movement, after this problem is tough to solve. It runs on a short, closed list of adjectives — easy, hard, safe, dangerous, good, nice, fun, ready, impossible — and able has never been on it, because able describes what the thing named can do, not what can be done to it. Swap in one word and the card is flawless. It was one adjective away.
And there is a second symmetry that almost nobody notices. 飲むことができます is not how a Japanese person actually talks either. In real speech you would say 飲めます — one word, potential form, four syllables shorter. 飲むことができます is the long textbook construction, drilled in the first year of junior high specifically because it maps cleanly onto can and be able to. So the card was written in textbook Japanese and then translated into textbook English, faithfully, by somebody doing exactly what they were taught. This is not an absence of education. It is the presence of it.
One last thing, before anyone blames a teacher. Look at the object again: a home-printed card in a plastic stand, beside a sink, in a small family guesthouse. That is the owner, at eleven at night, who has noticed that foreign guests keep asking about the water and would like them to stop worrying. The English-teacher theory requires you to believe an English teacher was in that bathroom. The realistic version is a person who has not written an English sentence since they were fifteen, doing an unpaid favour for strangers, and collecting six million views for it.
Japan gets mocked for its English signage for one reason: Japan puts up English signage. No screenshot has ever come out of a country that simply wrote nothing. The whole genre is a tax levied on effort. And it gets worse, because that card is not even necessary — Japan is one of a handful of countries where the tap water is safe everywhere, from any tap, without a thought, and no Japanese person has ever needed telling. The sign exists purely for guests from places where the question is real. So: a country whose water requires no explanation wrote one anyway, in your language, at eleven at night, to spare you the worry. And you photographed it.
- Japanese tap water is regulated under the Water Supply Act against just over fifty legally binding quality parameters, and is drinkable nationwide — cities, mountain villages, station bathrooms. Bottled water here is a convenience purchase, not a safety one.
- The tough construction is one of the strangest things English does, and native speakers have zero awareness of it. This book is easy to read is fine; this book is possible to read is odd; this book is able to read is comedy. Nobody is ever taught the difference — you are simply expected to have absorbed the list.
- The mirror image exists and English speakers produce it daily: 私は寿司です. Word for word, "I am sushi". It is completely correct Japanese for "I'll have the sushi", because は is a topic marker there too — and every learner who refuses to believe that is standing exactly where the writer of the card was standing.