Space challenged Shinjuku, Tokyo (September 2010): Photo by Kimie Takahashi

Tokyo is getting more and more linguistically diverse every time I go back there. During this trip, I was really amazed by how efficiently and elegantly Tokyo does multilingual signs, particularly on trains and at stations. And I wasn’t the only one to notice! Ingrid Piller’s and my observations contradict the prevalent view that it is hard to travel in Japan because Japanese can’t speak English or there are not enough English signs. One comment in response to Multilingual Tokyo also expressed the opinion that there is only so much space for multilingual signs. In this post, I’m going to bust these stereotypes and show that multilingual signs can be done elegantly using some examples from space-challenged Tokyo!

To begin with, in Tokyo, with 35 to 39 million people on the move from one place to another every day, electronic signage provides the answer. It is everywhere and so well designed! Ride one of the metro lines in Tokyo and you are bound to find electronic information (as in the photos below). First, information on the electronic signage above the doors on this train appears entirely in Japanese kanji (Picture 1), and then the name of the next station in green changes to hiragana (Picture 2 – great for kanji-challenged people like myself) and then to Roman characters (Picture 3). The name of the next station is back in kanji in Picture 4, but the other station names in black and connecting train lines to these stations are now in Roman characters. In Picture 5, the name of the next station changes to hiragana and the other station names remain in Roman characters and pretty much everything gets displayed in Roman characters in Picture 6. The prohibition against the use of mobile phones (Picture 7) appears bilingually (Picture 8), and as your train approaches to the station, the warning for the opening doors appears in Japanese (Picture 9) and English (Picture 10)!

According to their website, JR (the Japan Railway Company) is even switching from bilingual (Japanese and English) language services to quadrilingual services. They have started to offer, for instance, the website, signage within the stations, Information Centers and the Infoline (a telephone-based service) in four languages (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean).

Airport Limousine, too, is now thoroughly multilingual in the provision of their services (see pictures below), not only with their electronic signage at Limousine stops, but also information online and on the bus.

There are many more examples (I’ve taken more than 1,500 pictures in two weeks!), but the above certainly busts the persistent, monolingual myth about Japan, or at least Tokyo’s transport systems. Some parts of the city, of course, remain monolingual in Japanese, but in light of what we see in Tokyo today it is amazing that discourses of monolingual Japan or how funny Japanese English is still circulate. It is only recently that the Japanese Government launched its tourism campaign, Yokoso! Japan. It seems that the campaign has contributed to raising awareness of the importance of non-Japanese language services among government officials and business representatives. Coming from Sydney, where non-English signs on trains and busses are a rarity (including the train to our international airport as we reported in the Sydney Morning Herald) and having seen too many half-hearted, unprofessional signages in non-local languages in other tourist places, I take my hat off to Tokyo. If you take customer service and safety seriously in a metropolitan city and a tourism destination, you can never underestimate the importance of language provisions.

Overall, the increasing number of multilingual signs in general and the elegant and efficient ways in which these signs are displayed is a sign that Tokyo is a thriving international city and a great tourism destination.

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

Despite the fact that around 30% of Sydneysiders speak a language other than English at home and the fact that Sydney aspires to be a top international tourist destination, official signage – directions, prohibitions, warnings, street names etc. – are in English only. By contrast, pretty much all such signage I’ve seen in Tokyo during the past week was at least bilingual in Japanese and English. A fair number were not only bilingual but quadrilingual in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean as this direction sign at Shinjuku Station. To put this in perspective, only around 250,000 of Tokyo’s 35 million residents are non-Japanese – less than 1% of the population (as I learnt from the poster below).

If Tokyo’s official signage can be inclusive of the languages of less than 1% of the population, why can’t Sydney’s official signage attempt to be inclusive of the languages of 30% of the population? Chinese speakers alone constitute a much larger segment of the population than all non-Japanese speakers in Tokyo combined …

Not surprisingly many of the Japanese tourists in our study of language challenges faced by the Australian tourism industry commented that simply adding multilingual signage at Sydney’s international airport, for instance, could easily improve passenger flow at that airport. They obviously speak from experience. Seeing the usual crowds, queues and general chaos that greeted me in the arrivals hall when I arrived back home yesterday, I can only say it’s high time we started to pay attention to international best practice!

To begin with, they couldn’t have picked a better place than Tsuda College to host the first IGALA conference in Japan. Well done, the IGALA 6 Organizing Team! Tsuda College was originally founded by Umeko Tsuda, one of the first five young Japanese women to be sent by the Japanese Government to the US to study English and modernity in the late 19^th century. Upon return, Tsuda started the first higher education institute for women where students would be trained to become English language teachers. Her aim was to assist graduates in becoming financially independent upon graduation. More than a century later, this idea of the English teaching profession for women, or simply “English as women’s weapon” (as we discussed here, here and here), is still very much with us in Japan. Attendees, make sure you visit Tsuda Umeko Museum on campus!

It’s not only the venue that is impressive about IGALA, but it’s also the line-up of the keynote speakers. We will have the pleasure of listening to Momoko Nakamura, Deborah Cameron and our very own Ingrid Piller and what they have to say about the state of our field. If you want to know more about them in preparation for the conference, take a look at these advance interviews in the Language Teacher (Ingrid Piller, Momoko Nakamura & Deborah Cameron). Overall, the conference program looks great, with interesting individual papers and panels including my own, entitled Working Women on the Move! We’ll let you know when and if we get tired of the “on the move” phrase On that panel, Vera Williams Tetteh, Donna Butorac and I will explore the intersection of language, transmigration and employment in women’s lives.

In addition to Ingrid and myself, the Language-on-the-Move team at IGALA will include our guest-blogger Vera, our junior editor Jenny and our fan and PhD supervisee, Donna.

Got a few spare days in Tokyo after the conference? If it’s your first time in Tokyo, some must-visit-places include Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shibuya, Asakusa, Roppongi and Akihabara, and information about these places can be found on Unmissable Tokyo, a tourist information website run by another Language-on-the-Move fan, computational linguist and Japan enthusiast, Mike Dowman. I’m heading back to my usual spots, like Shin-ookubo for Korean cuisine, Kabukicho for a 24/7 ramen shop, queer Shinjyuku Nichome for Thai food and my hometown Tsurumi for a yakitori restaurant which shakes like crazy every time a train passes right behind it.

Now, if you are an L & G researcher visiting Language on the Move for the first time, welcome! Gender is something we’ve been blogging about since we first started this site back in November 2009. Some of our gender blog posts are:

• English-Only at Bon Secours
• Domestic violence in a multilingual world
• Jasmin Tabatabai: German, Persian and English in Tehran and Berlin
• How (not) to address airline passengers
• Men, English, and international romance
• Orientalism and tourism (for the Chinese-language version press here)
• More on orientalism and tourism
• Foreign nurses face the Kanji hurdle
• Child pornography and language learning
• What’s otoosan’s name?”: Multilingual Couple Talk revisited
• What has Western masculinity got to do with English language learning for Japanese women?
• and more!

Also check out our open-source gender-related papers available in the resource section: Language learning, gender & identity & Multilingual families! Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for daily updates – our FB and Twitter officers will welcome you all:-)

That’s it from me for now. We will keep you posted about our first Language-on-the-Move tour to Japan with live-blogging directly from the IGALA conference!