This paper explores the ways of speaking emerging in a Japanese hospital in response to adoption of a foreign concept, "preceptorship," a nursing educational program for training novices in real working environments. The paper notes that although the program was first developed in English-speaking countries, Japanese nurses have recently begun to import it into their terms of nursing education, using the foreign word "preceptorship," even though it might be differently interpreted due to cultural differences. The paper details ethnographic observation of the nurses at Osaka University Hospital--their patterns of communication in light of their organizational knowledge and behaviors which enable them to make their knowledge practical. It describes the nurses' explicit ongoing processes of constructing the distinctive codes of communicative acts as preceptors or preceptees. Specifically, it analyzes two tensions in the import of the concept "preceptorship": the primary tension arising in the process of adapting and enacting an unfamiliar concept, and a secondary tension arising following the anchoring processes, where nurses rethink their own senses of the value of their roles as nurses. Research data were collected by participant observation, ethnographic interviews, and analysis of written narratives. The paper concludes that the nurses did not feel much difficulty in anchoring a foreign concept to their nursing practices and education. It finds that they interpreted preceptorship in their own ways, comparing it with similar concepts; however, its togetherness, one of primary concepts of preceptorship, invoked controversial utterances. (Contains 32 references.) (NKA)