Japan: English

One of the many things that puzzle me about Japan is its use of the English language. It's not as if everyone speaks English--they certainly don't, although you can usually find someone who will muddle through with you when you need them. But there is so much of it around, fragmented and often unexpected. So many subway and train signs in English (or at least "Latin" letters). Company logo names: Sanyo and Toyota, of course, but also "Family Mart," and "Coffee Shop Sushi"--also, come to think of it, "Boulangerie" and "En Provence" (McDonald's, remarkably, uses its English name, but only in secondary letters underneath its Japanese name). And book titles: even if the entire book is in Japanese, the cover title may be in English--what is that about?

I find I am not the first to note this curiosity. Old Japan hand Ian Buruma points out that it has been going on for a long time:

What, you might well ask, is a 'mobo' or a 'maihomu papa' or a 'nopan kissa'? Well, mobo is shorthand, current in the 1920s, for modern boy, a young man of fashion; a maihomu (my home) papa is a house-proud family man; and nopan (no-pants) kissa is a bar offering the services of nude waitresses. The English language used in this Japanized way is ornamental, expressing a mood of exoticism or modernity. It sounds cosmopolitan, but isn't.

--Ian Buruma, "Edward Seidensticker: An American in Tokyo" 37-44, 41,
in The Missionary and the Libertine (2002)
[Originally published in the New York Review of Books, 1990]