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Linguistic landscapes

Multilingual Tokyo

By September 28, 2010May 30th, 201913 Comments2 min read11,999 views

I had been led to believe that Japan was a very monolingual place interspersed with Engrish ads, commercial signage and T-shirts. Well, that has turned out to be just another stereotype! Tokyo is an amazingly multilingual place! Official signage in Tokyo is much more multilingual than official signage in Sydney.

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!

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 13 Comments

  • steven says:

    It has taken many years, but the japanese government has finally recognised the benefits of international inbound tourism and are taking steps to reform/upgrade the industry. Apparantly one of the biggest challenges they face in boosting tourism is changing the attitude of many resident japanese who percieve foriegners as dangerous. I am not sure if it is true, but a japanese tourism agency survey a few years ago claimed that nearly 40% of locals dont even want foreign tourists in the country…. the agency itself said that this was a big problem for them in expanding the industry…

  • Mike says:

    I remember once taking a domestic flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to the west of Japan. All of the announcements on the plane were in both Japanese and English – and yet as far as I could tell I was the only non-Japanese person there. I felt so privileged that JAL would go to all this effort just for me!

  • Tokyo is probably much more space challenged than any city in Australia. This seems to have helped Japanese people to become creative and well organised in terms of using their limited space for signs (I’m planning to blog about multilingual electronic signs soon;-). However, the real issue here is not a matter of space per se, but the ideology of languages that inform the decision of government officials, business reps and tourism authorities in terms of the provision of language services for residents and tourists. When the majority of tourists in Japan come from non-English speaking countries, Japanese tourism organisations are well aware of the limitation of English, a reason behind Tokyo’s increasingly quadrilingual landscape.

  • Mr Sands says:

    Yes but if English is the “international language”, what other languages should you pick for the signs of Sydney?
    Languages from neighbouring countries? Largest amount of foreign travellers? There is only so much space available.

  • Thanks, Ingrid, for the update! It’s really amazing how much more multilingual Tokyo gets every time I go back there. I have plenty of photos to back your observation and will write more soon. Particularly interesting to me was multilingual signs on the ground and those in hidden spots 😉

  • Angela Turzynski-Azimi says:

    The subway in Tokyo goes a step further than multi-lingual signage by using a combination of letters, numbers and colours to denote stations, enabling people from a wide range of language backgrounds
    to identify stations on signs or maps and thereby navigate the transport system. M-08 with a red circle around it denotes station no. 8 on the Marunouchi Line (coloured red on maps), which is Shinjuku Station.

  • steven says:

    the signage is very helpful. The local Japanese residents of Tokyo must certainly have the impression that they live in an international city…

  • cba says:

    Yes, I really enjoyed the multilingual signage while in Tokyo. It made me feel so privileged as an English speaker, so fortunate that the Tokyo officials had been kind enough to explain themselves in ways that I could decipher…and so embarrassed that the world felt the need to bend to my pathetic English language monolingualism. But after only a week in Tokyo, I now find myself wanting to say arigato gozaimus after every Australian service encounter!

  • Khan says:

    Dear Ingrid

    Thanks for your post. I also had the same perception about Japan, out-and-out monolingual place but of your post tell a different story. Please allow me to share an interesting observation regarding Macdonald language practices in Pakistan.
    When the chain opened its outlets in Pakistan, they hired locals who were relatively fluent speakers of English for food services counters. These boys and girls used to be of white complexion, dressed in Macdonald international dress code and would only speak in English. This language practice gave rise to a class of McDonald’s goer Pakistanis because they could easily place their orders in English. The company, it seems to me, realized the financial implications of English-only and soon reverted to multilingualism with English, Urdu, Punjabi etc. Now Macdonald thrives as it is swarmed with people who are comfortable in placing their orders in their local languages. I also realize the presence of brown skins working there.
    As you have rightly pointed out in your post that for a country which aspires to become an international tourist resort, should have sensible official signage practices.

    I look forward to listening to your keynote.

    Best wishes

    Khan

  • Angela Turzynski-Azimi says:

    Looking at the following, I see that the population figures are swelled by including those of neighboring prefectures:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Tokyo_Area

    To think that we spent all those years living in these neighboring prefectures and commuting into “Tokyo” without realising that we were actually included in these statistics. It would never have occurred to us to say that we lived in Tokyo.

    By the way, the cartoon baby being used in an official capacity did not even register as being in the least bit odd!

  • Angela Turzynski-Azimi says:

    Hi Ingrid

    Welcome back! I am just wondering about your population statistics for Tokyo. Do you mean the Kanto Region? I think the population of Tokyo is closer to 11 million.

    Angela

    • Thanks, Angela! Tokyo is just such an amazing, weird and wonderful place! No matter how you do the counting … the 35 mio were quoted in a poster at the demographics exhibition I went to and where I took the picture with the stats for the foreign residents. Maybe I should have wondered about stats that are presented by a cartoon baby in diapers … anyway, I’m not a specialist but Wikipedia, too, says 35-39 million for the metropolitan area.

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