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Akie Abe, first lady of Japan and wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has spoken English many times in public, fluently, with only the slightest accent.

She chatted, for example, about a shared admiration for star baseball pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka (then of the Boston Red Sox), at the White House with President George W. Bush and his wife Laura in 2007. She has chatted with Laureen Harper, had cocktails with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, spoken to business leaders in New York, and to a Virginia elementary school audience with Michelle Obama

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She has even met Donald and Melania Trump a couple of times, earlier this year at Andrews Air Force Base, followed by a weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, where the two men played golf.

Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times

And yet, last week at the G20 summit in Germany, when the opera performance ended, Trump says she was seated next to him for dinner and simply sat in silence, rather than endure the presidential chit chat.

She appears to have pretended not to speak English, pulling off one of the greatest tricks in the history of dinner diplomacy.

If so, Abe had a plausible reason, as Trump has a long record of disrespectful behaviour toward women, most recently an aggressive handshake and lewd comment about the body of Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France.