Quote:
Originally Posted by Umihito
About your second paragraph:
I see what you mean by saying it's good for tourism, but I still think it's unfair. I am a little biased because I do find English signage annoying, and to me it's nothing but slow culture loss on show. I've been to countless other countries that have an even bigger booming tourism industry and they have signs in nothing but their native tongue, and some even don't have announcements or station guides on their trains, not even for the locals! Yet I've never seen any problems, nor have I had any.
Anyway, as to why I said it's unfair. What about French tourists who can't speak Japanese or English? Germans? Dutch? Italians? What if they can't speak English or Japanese? But surely they manage fine or we'd have Germans, Italians, French, Dutch etc roaming the streets of Tokyo in a lost daze. Maybe more speak English than I think, but I don't know.
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I'm not sure how much you have travelled but in my experience in countries that have completely different alphabets or writing systems to english they generally have more signs in english if they want to promote tourism. You see if you travel to say Portugal, Argentina or Germany you can still at least read the letters on the signs even if your pronounciation may be totally wrong. For someone wanting to holiday in Japan who's never studied Japanese (the vast bulk of people who travel to Japan) they just couldn't manage with only Kanji and Kana. Especially as not many Japanese people can speak english that well and even if they do they are often too shy to try. People from China and Taiwan manage reasonably well without any english signs as they can understand the meaning of the Kanji (if not the pronounciation) but they generally can't read the kana.
And in my experience of travelling around the world I don't think I've ever met a European person who's travelled outside of Europe who doesn't speak a reasonable amount of english and can read it pretty well. In fact I've generally found they speak at least 3 languages!
I don't see the use of english as slow culture loss though. Kanji itself was derived from Chinese characters. Wasn't that also a huge culture loss if you think of it that way? It's just the culture evolving as all cultures do. Anyway some of the funniest stuff you'll see in Japan in the engrish on signs. It's way too funny to get annoyed at!
