Look very closely
It happened to me again last weekend, not that I was really surprised. After five years in Japan it’s happened so many times in so many places that the only thing I note now is how novel it was. Sometimes I wonder if they do it on purpose, to see our reaction, and I check around for a hidden camera waiting for a man to jump out and say, “Surprise, you’re on candid camera!” But it never happens. Seriously, how hard is it to use spellchecker?
On a whim I had decided to take a trip to Wakayama City (about 2 hours South of Kyoto) to see the castle and watch a sunset on the Pacific. The weather was perfect, warm with a cool breeze, wafting clouds in a pristine blue sky, Fall in the air, everything was going great. After trudging up the traditional tall hill with uneven steps I bought my entry ticket and headed up yet another small set of stairs to the main gate which sat before me with thick wooden doors.
A small wooden fence stretched from one side of the gate to the other with a gap for tourists to move through. To the left of the gap was a stand with multilingual informational pamphlets, English, Japanese, Spanish, Korean and Chinese, quite thorough. To the right was a large wooden box with a slit in the top prominently labeled ‘Wickets.’
Yes, ‘Wickets.’ I took not one, not two, but three looks to make sure I was seeing correctly. I checked the Japanese text underneath ‘Wickets’ and sure enough it was a box for people to put their tickets in as they passed. The sign was not a typical printed paper encased in laminate to protect it from the elements sheet but a heavy piece of wood with the words intricately carved in and glossed. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to make a beautiful sign but had not even bothered to check to make sure the English was correct.
English is plastered all over the place in Japan. On clothes, on signs, on official documents, but it seems that no one makes any effort to check what they are saying or if they are saying it right.
Is it really a good idea to have 6 and 7 year old children wearing shirts that say ‘Playboy,’‘B1tch,’ or ‘whore?’ (Yes, I have seen all of those on children’s clothes) Every time I see the high school girls pile on to the train wearing their ‘cute’ Playboy socks (featuring the Playboy bunny logo) I have to laugh. Do they really know what they are wearing and what they are promoting? Do their supervisors and parents know or even care? The last time my parents came for a visit my mom was shocked to see a shirt that displayed two people in a questionable position with the word ‘F@ck’ displayed in bold text.
It’s not just fashion. You only have to look up to see English littering signs adding ‘flash’ to Japanese script. I saw a sign a few weeks ago that was so cluttered with English that it took me a couple of minutes to figure out that it was a real-estate agent (I think) and not a cafe. If I had a penny for every time I saw the words fun, life, smile and relax on a sign I would be a millionaire. There is a set of English words that most people understand and those are used 
exhaustively whether they fit or not. If you want to go to a ‘relax café’ or have a ‘fun driving life?” just let me know.
One thing I really do appreciate is many restaurants and other establishments are trying to assist non-Japanese speaking customers through English signs, menus etc. However, something that continues to puzzle me is since they went through all that effort to put it together foreigner friendly material in the first place why don’t they take a little more energy and have a native speaker take five minutes and look it over. Word’s spellchecker is great and auto-grammar-correct is a boon, if you know what you want to say in the first place. If you don’t you end up saying things like, ‘Japan Rail Pass not available here’ instead of ‘Japan Rail Pass cannot be used here (Keihan railway Sanjo station Kyoto).’ I haven’t met an English speaking local or visiting tourist who wouldn’t take 30 seconds to point out the major errors while having a good laugh
It is sad to say but governmental forms are not immune. Even with massive funding, uncountable employees, and expertise up the wazoo there will be times that you sit poring over their ‘translation’ wondering how many monkeys in a room with typewriters it took to write this? Those of you who have received letters like that, you understand. Those of you have not, be glad for you have been spared a splitting headache.
Foreign languages, like many things in life, are difficult and should be respected. No country is immune to the misuse and abuse of language but in my opinion it is a high art here in Japan. How else could you explain the abundance of just plain wrong English? Words that carry weight are spread around advertisements and sewn into clothing like simple meaningless images, simply because they are fashionable.
But then again sometimes you find perfect English in the strangest of places.
Only in Japan.
