Twelve words of Japanese

I have twelve words of Japanese and I'm about to use all of them on a man with a towel on his head. The izakaya is under the train tracks in Osaka. Eight seats. Smoke. A TV in the corner showing baseball that nobody's watching. I found it by following two salarymen who looked like they knew where they were going, which is my main travel strategy and has a roughly sixty percent success rate. There's no English menu. There's no menu, actually. There's a wall of wooden boards with characters on them and a chef behind the counter who has just looked at me the way you'd look at a dog that's wandered into a bank. "Sumimasen," I say. That's one. He nods. Waits. "Biru?" Two. That works. A beer arrives. It's very cold and I'm so relieved I could cry. The man next to me, sixties, sleeves rolled up, grins and raises his glass a couple of centimetres. I raise mine. We drink. No words needed for that one. Now food. I know "kore" (this) and "onegaishimasu" (please) and "oishii" (delicious) and I know "yakitori," and that's four more, but I can't see any yakitori and I can't read the boards. So I do the thing. I point at what the man next to me is eating. "Kore, onegaishimasu?" The chef looks at my neighbour's plate. Looks at me. Says something to my neighbour. My neighbour laughs and says something back and the chef shrugs and starts cooking. The plate arrives. I do not know what it is. Something grilled, something skewered, a sauce that's dark and sweet and a little smoky. I eat it. It's excellent. "Oishii," I say, and mean it, and the chef almost smiles, which I'm going to count as a win. My neighbour taps the counter next to my plate. Points at it. Then he mimes something. He puts his hands to his head, fingers pointing up. Horns. "Cow?" I say, in English, uselessly. He shakes his head. Hands to his head again. Then he flaps them. Ears. Not horns. Ears. Big ears. I look at the plate. I look at him. "Oishii," I say again, because it was, and there's no point going back on it now, and he slaps me on the back and orders me another beer, and the chef puts a second skewer on the grill without being asked, and I've got seven words left and I think I might not need them.