Talk like a gaijin
The government hopes to boost the economy with English lessons
ITS buses and trains arrive on the dot. Its engineers are famously precise. But when it comes to English, Japan is uncharacteristically sloppy. Signs are often misspelled. Taxi drivers point at phrasebooks to communicate with foreigners. Shops that take an English name to be trendy often get it horribly wrong: witness “Poopdick”, a second-hand cosmetics outlet.
This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline “Talk like a gaijin”
From the August 27th 2016 edition
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