I have a pretty sizeable collection of Turbografx games, several of which are Japanese. I buy only simple games with little reading, since I don’t speak much Japanese. Interestingly though, they have a varying amount of English. In many of the games, only dialog is in Japanese. All menus and simple instructions are in English. Why is this? The games are targetted mainly to Japanese children. How could they possibly understand “Press Run” better than the Japanese equivalent?
Arle you sure you’le not mistakening bad Engrish transrations for original Japanese verlsions?
I’ll second the OP. I have several Japan-only xbox releases that have various mixes of English and Japanese. One has all the dialogue and level descriptions in English, but all the menus and things are in Japanese. None of these are translations or meant for a non-Japanese market.
At the time they were made, they were presumably expecting an international market. ‘Press Run’ would be understood by the necessary people who would implement all the alternative language options. It’s only when a game does the equivalent of straight-to-video that this might become obvious.
No, I’m not talking about Last Alert. They’re real Japanese games.
When I lived in Japan, putting English (or “Engrish”) stuff on things was considered a good marketing move as so many people considered English (or what they thought was English) to be cool. The same thing goes for where I am now, South Korea. A couple of years ago, one teenage girl in our ward had to give a talk during Sacrament service. She was wearing a red jersey with “I Love” where a player’s name would be and “69” for the number. She has no clue what that really means. She chose the shirt because “It’s cool!” In other words, “It’s English!”
Yeah, I guess it’s the coolness factor. A lot of people understand the basic menu words like “save”, and “start”.
But if you play a really Japanese themed game, such as stealth assasin (ninja theme) or one of the historical Chinese warlord themed games, everything will be in Japanese, including the menus, I guess because it keeps more to the theme.
It’s cool to use English in Japan, even if it is meaningless or worse in actual English. I recall seeing a vehicle (it was a van or SUV) when I was in Japan that had large letters “MU” on the rear. I was curious and went closer to see what the full words after the two letters were. It turned out that the full model name was “Mysterious Utility”! I asked my Japanese host what this could possibly mean and he replied that it meant nothing; it was sufficient that it be in English.
Mysterious, indeed.
I wonder the same thing watching Ninja Warrior on G4. It’s an all Japanese obstacle course game show and the commentator talks in all Japanese, except once in a while he’ll bust out some english for no good reason in the middle of a sentence…
“japanesejapanesejapanese Spider Walkuh japanesejapanesejapanese Second Stagey”
As if they don’t have a word for Spider in Japanese? Or Second??
They must be employing native English-speakers (or close to it) to write the things, but not to check them. That’s the only explanation.
Did the vehicle have the Buddha nature?
From photographs I’ve seen plenty of signage in Japan has English words.
Because they’re training for the day when all our base are belong to them? 
Based on my experience with anime (which as everyone knows is an infallible source 
), Japanese has adopted a lot of English vocabulary. For example, people now say “Sankyu” instead “Arigato” and “Bai bai” instead of “Sayonara”.
It’s not like the same doesn’t happen over here, if to a lesser degree. You could wear a shirt or get a tattoo with kanji that means “dog turds” and it’d be cool, because it’s Asian.
I assume it’s the same reason as all Japanese home electronics (CD/DVD players, etc) has all the writing on the front in English?
I’m reaching way back to my undergraduate years when I took Japanese, but: in general, for some reason, Japanese people like the look of English words. I don’t know why. It’s not too different from the instinct that causes Americans to get cool-looking Japanese tattoos that are supposed to say “super ninja badass” but instead mean “try the spicy shrimp”, I suppose.
Japanese is a very malleable language. New words are absorbed at an incredible rate. They just take the word in English (or whatever language) and adapt it into Japanese phonemes for easy pronunciation, and there ya go. There’s a whole Japanese “alphabet” used almost exclusively to write words from foreign languages (katakana). I remember looking at pictures of Tokyo in a National Geographic magazine once, and reading the sign on a McDonald’s: “do-ra-i-bu su-ru”. Ah. “Drive-through”. Again, you’d think they’d either have a term, or would create one, but nope, just pull in the English words and call it a day.
French, from what I’ve heard, is pretty much the opposite; they’re quite concerned with keeping foreign words out of the language.
Complete wag but could it be(at least partially) because English characters are more readily identifiable at really low resolutions?
I imagine it would be difficult to distinguish between シ and ツ, for example, on a font that wont take up too much of a 256 × 224 resolution screen. I’ve seen English fonts that are comfortably readable with no more then 5x3 pixels per character but I don’t know that you could make a Japanese font that small.
Another example: this music video by Halcali pop-rappers contains a substantial amount of English words in the lyrics. There’s English subtitles, and if you listen carefully you can catch a lot of non-J words they say, though it is very difficult, they speak/sing very quickly. One easy spot is near the end:
Etc. For all I know, that part may be entirely in English and I just can’t parse the phrasing. On a casual listen with no subtitles, I would have had no idea it wasn’t all Japanese language.
No, that’s pretty much an international market thing. My washing machine, oven, rice cooker, DVD player and television all have exclusively Japanese writing on them. Only my sound equipment is in English but they’re models that are also available abroad.
I really, really wish people would stop repeating this canard. French absorbs a huge amounts of foreign words, especially English. 5% of French vocabulary is of English origin, up from 2.5% 100 years ago. English words are especially common in vernacular speech. In French, you leave your car at the “parking” and eat “fast-food” when you go “shopping” on “weekends” for stuff to put in your “living”. Here’s a list; most of these words are very common.
If you want an example of a language that doesn’t import many words, Chinese is a good choice. Probably in large part because of the writing system, words are more often translated than incorporated as-is in the language.
It’s not that they don’t have a word for spider, it’s that in combination with “walker,” it becomes a specific phrase and thus the whole thing can be translated to English.
It would probably be spelled “supaidaa waruka” or something. Filipino TV is even stranger, when they switch from Tagalog to random words in English with perfect American accents. They almost certainly already have words for these terms already.