Random Acts of Engrish By Greg Beck Something most every foreign language speaker loves when they come to Japan are the random mistakes written, in other languages, all over…everything. My French speaking friend owns a bike that says “petit veil”, which according to him is completely wrong, and “Comme ça, Du mode” should be “Comme ça, de la mode”, but because English is my language of expertise, I would like to focus this article on this phenomena as it pertains to English, more often referred to as “Engrish”. The
name
Engrish plays with the fact that many Japanese people have trouble distinguishing “L” and “R”. However, Engrish itself refers to any blatant error in English made in Japan. First, let me say that in my experience, there is never a condescending tone or malice when calling it Engrish, or laughing at the mistakes we find. In fact, many people, including myself, find the mistakes charming and enjoy the break it provides from monotony. With that disclaimer, let’s take a look at the different kinds of Engrish and where it can be found most often. Of all the many forms of Engrish, tshirts win by sheer volume. Not only because so many tshirts in Japan have English on them, but often one tshirt will have a huge block of text ten lines long (or longer) of seemingly random words strung together arbitrarily. I call this “shotgun Engrish” because it looks as though someone has fired a hole through a dictionary and pasted the pieces they picked up haphazardly. Sometimes it is possible to understand the general message the makers were aiming for, particularly if you think of how the same words would sound in Japanese. Frequently these texts will say “It is” over and over as a sort of default, standin for when Japanese leaves out the subject. So a Japanese phrase that should translate to “Days I go to school…” turns into “It is goes to school day…” Plurals are another problem with these “translations”. Since Japanese rarely articulates singular are
plural (i.e. cat, and cats), verbs are also improperly conjugated. Another easy target for Engrish are proper names. Stores and shops will often have an English name, perhaps to attract the eye of passersby or to express a sense of the exotic, but even when the words are spelled correctly, the sheer lack of context makes them appear awkward to a native speaker. The biggest Engrish sign perpetrators are hair salons. Sometimes, after studying Japanese, it is easy to forgive. For example “Make” comes from WaseiEigo or “Japanesemade English”, and most Japanese people don’t realize the word does not equal the verb “to style”. But then there are other names like “Plague”, “Chambers”, or “Antena”. Maybe “plague” works on some avantgarde level, but no matter how hard I try, I cannot rationalize “antena”, except that the spelling error probably comes from the Romanization of the same word in Japanese. That still begs the question: “Why Antenna?” Another Engrish name hobbyist are the car companies. I’m willing to bet every car company from any country, has at least one car with a foreign name, but Japanese manufacturers names cars much the way pharmaceutical companies name drugs; usually the name is a made up word with no meaning whatsoever. Some cars have names like “Every”, or “It’s”. “Let’s” is one I actually feel works, as well as the squat van, appropriately named “Scrum”. There is even a car called “Cima”, a Spanish word, if I may digress, meaning hilltop! I used to drive an Isuzu Amigo back in America, but in Japan it was called “Mu”! Everywhere you go in this country you can find the occasional “b” instead of “v” or no space between a period and the following word (i.e. Mr.Beck) but for some reason, my alltime favorite Engrish is found in restaurant menus. Again, let me stress that I think it is great when restaurants put in the minimal effort required in making a multilingual menu. It is a nice step toward tourism promotion and internationalization, and mistakes in English have never been an indication of the quality of food served. But when I read a menu, looking for what sounds good, nothing gets me laughing out loud faster than Engrish found in menus. Many times my friends and I have taken double or triple the normal time to order because we found searching for hilarious mistakes more important than sating our hunger. Classic mistakes include spelling “pork” as “polk”, or “meet” instead of “meat”, but the one that
cracked me up the most was for a “crub meat harf and harf” (crab meat, halfandhalf) pizza! I was crying from laughing so hard and pronouncing it out loud the way it was misspelled only made us laugh more. As a side note, the contexts of English words that pop up in Japan deserve mentioning. Like I mentioned previously, I find those words spelled correctly, but used with complete disregard for context, to be the most puzzling. Things like a children’s pencil box with a marijuana smoking chimpanzee and the words “Don’t bogart the joint!” or a dainty young Japanese woman appearing on the news wearing a light summer blouse with, among other random words worked into the pattern, the word “fuck” stretched proudly across her shoulder. Now there are some stories of people who let themselves become offended by these things, but because they are devoid of context, they shouldn’t bother anyone, except maybe the Japanese. Engrish has become, or perhaps already was, one of the stereotypes of Japan. While the list of positive stereotypes Japan enjoys is not a short one, on an individual level, negative stereotypes should be hurdles to overcome. Americans are sometimes depicted as fat, ignorant of foreign cultures, and devoid of geography and foreign language skills. While I know that is simply not the case, I still feel a personal obligation to defy that image myself. But while Japan wants and is trying hard to improve their English education system, there is a shocking ambivalence and disregard of the English already saturating Japan. A large part of the problem may be katakana. So many foreign words have become part of the Japanese language through katakana, and most Japanese students of English rely on using katakana as a crutch instead of learning English phonetics, even well into their adult lives. Using katakana this way might seem lazy, but Japanese, using both kanji and kana has always relied on the use of furigana, text written in kana to define a kanji’s reading, so it must have seemed natural to apply this to English as well. But because there is no way to properly denote English pronunciations using a Japanese alphabet, this habit perpetuates the inability to
distinguish things like “L”s and “R”s, and more importantly, is one more factor prohibiting the next step in English fluency that would teach the all important facet of context – specifically, why one word with the same dictionary definition does not always work in place of another. As far as a visitor or outsider goes, I’m happy to laugh at these innocent mistakes. In fact, Engrish.com is a website devoted to posting examples of Engrish found in Japan. But as someone who loves Japan and prays for its success in bilingual education, I would like to see Engrish disappear.