A course designed to teach survival Japanese language and culture to businessmen and professionals with little time for language study is described. The goals were to teach survival vocabulary and a few basic sentence structures and to develop the learners' pragmatic competence in using them. Portions of a commercial textbook were used for instruction. The class met in 4-hour sessions for 11 consecutive days, with just over half the instruction in English and the remainder in Japanese. Basic principles used in conducting the course included: use of short sentences; teaching phonetic differences between English and Japanese; instruction in the effective use of two expressions: "Onegaishimasu and Sumimasen"; use of contextualized exercises; and incorporation of detailed explanations on usage of expressions. Those who wish to continue Japanese language study are able to join the regular first-year course in the second term, with some additional study of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. (MSE)