This paper presents our findings during the development of the recognition engine for the Japanese part of the VERBMOBIL speech-to-speech translation project. We describe an efficient method to bootstrap a large vocabulary speech recognizer for spontaneously spoken Japanese speech from a German recognizer and show that the amount of effort in developing the system could be reduced by using this rapid cross language bootstrapping technique. The Japanese recognizer is integrated into the VERBMOBIL system and shows very promising results achieving 9.3% word error rate.