Why is written or spoken English used in Japan to market to Japanese

Factual Questions
1

While watching the video in the thread “New Toyota Japan Ad with Topless Model”:

I was reminded of something that I was always curious about.

Why is it that English is used in Japan - for example:

  1. In that ad for the Toyota - it is clearly for a Japanese car - yet it contains both spoken (poorly by my ears) and written English. I find this fairly often. Most or some of an ad will be in Japanese, but some is in English - why?!? In this ad - the only spoken words are in English.

  2. it appears - that company names - such as Toyota and Sony are often written in English (as far as I can tell - always, but I couldn’t tell if it wasn’t - as I don’t read Japanese). Is this the case with some/most multinational companies? Does it differ with domestic only (in Japan) companies?

  3. With Pokemon cards - the English version reads “Pokemon” on the back - which I understand in Japanese (presumably phonetically) for “Pocket Monsters”. The Japanese Pokemon cards actually read “Pocket Monsters”. I assumed this might be cause it is cool for kids to have something with a foreign sounding name on the back, but now I’m not so sure.

  4. Websites will also have some English in the - sometimes just for navigation, but often for other areas/purposes as well - see citizen.jp for an example.

Anyway - just curious.

2

Because English is big in Japan.

3

Keep in mind that a lot of times what you’re hearing isn’t really English, per se. It’s essentially a form of Japanese slang that borrows English words and (sometimes) grammatical rules. If you hear a Japanese person using an English word or phrase, it probably originated from that word but don’t be quick to assume they mean the same thing. In fact, most Japanese people don’t really speak English. At least not well. For instance, “tenshon” (tension) means something around “exciting.” On the other hand, there are words like “slaryman” or “office lady” (OL) that mean pretty much what you’d expect them to. There’s some nuance, but the first guess you’d take at what it means is probably correct enough.

But yes, the general reason is that English “appeals” to people in Japan, it’s “cool” to use English. In fact, in Japanese, English loan words are written in katakana. It’s becoming common for companies to write their names in katakana due to this, even if they’re obviously Japanese（or at least, some Japanese people I know say this is the reason). For instance, I’ve seen a lot of merchandise from Honda with ホンダ (katakana) instead of　本田 or even its hiragana version ほんだ (the way you spell the name in Japanese).

Though I hear that America/English is slowly losing ground in the trendiness department to South Korea nowadays.

4

Another example is that a “note” (as used in the manga/anime DEATHNOTE – yes, that’s the Japanese title) would be called a “notebook” in English.

5

“The Roman/Latin alphabet” <> “English”.

The names of multinational companies from countries whose main language does not use this alphabet are written using it everywhere because it’s a “company image” issue, it’s about branding: you want your customers to recognize your brand wherever they are. Using the alphabet that’s majoritary in the world, and which many people are familiar from foreign brands or second languages (when it’s not their own native languages’ alphabet) is more cost-effective than using another one. A company which never expects to go global (“Mr. Fuji’s Eatery”) will use the local alphabet, but any company which has the whole world in its sights will go for the Roman alphabet or use double-branding (less likely nowadays, more likely 60 years ago).

For some companies it’s been a lot of work to go from having different names in different countries to having a single name and brand everywhere (in the mid-20th century, it was more common to brand per country than globally; often a company’s subsidiaries would try to sound “local”). Some are still working on it, there’s an ice cream brand whose distinctive “heart” logo can be found in dozens of countries but carries a different word in different locations.

6

Why are many things, including some people’s bodies, in English speaking countries decorated with Chinese or Japanese characters?

7

Verified something: Spanish company Viscofan spells its name like that, yet in Spain everybody including its employees and owners pronounce it Viscofán; the tilde is left out of the logo for internationalization. There’s other companies which had an ñ or a tilde and which changed names when they started going to non-Spanish speaking countries. The idea is to sell to the foreigners, not baffle them.

8

If you want to be technical, while the title said DEATHNOTE, under it it said the phonetic pronunciation デスノート (desu nooto), which is another common way to write it. But yes, in Japanese “note” has been adopted as “nooto” (due to Japanese phonetics) and essentially means “notebook”.

Another example is ゴム (gomu) which means “rubber”, but comes from “gum.” In Japanese, it’s probably most common in the word 消しゴム (keshi gomu – eraser), but English speakers might know the term best because of the main character in the manga/anime One Piece.

9

Missed edit:
A particularly interesting example of English/Japanese cognates that I’ve always wanted to know more about is tobacco. In Japanese, tobacco is とばこ (lit. tobako), this is in hiragana, used for writing Japanese native words (or words that came from Chinese without kanji) it even has kanji associated with it, albeit it’s usually not written with them. This means that a word pronounced “tobacco” with the same meaning* entered the language a good while ago, long enough that it’s essentially considered a native word rather than a loan word. I assume it has to do with trade. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d guess it entered the language somewhere around the Meiji restoration, but that’s pretty much a WAG. It may not even have come directly from English, instead perhaps entering Chinese and coming to Japan as a Chinese word.

  • Well, the same general meaning. Obviously the uses are slightly different, but they still ultimately refer to the same plant in similar contexts.

ETA: I was way off, it was introduced by Portugese in 1542, I knew the English word came from Spanish, but I didn’t expect the new world crop to make it all the way back during sengoku jidai.

10

[quote=“Jragon, post:9, topic:633709”]

Missed edit:
A particularly interesting example of English/Japanese cognates that I’ve always wanted to know more about is tobacco. In Japanese, tobacco is とばこ (lit. tobako),
It’s たばこ (tabako).

There are many more imports that have kanji. Unlike tabacco, many of those are archaic. For instance:

瓦斯 gasu -> gas
硝子 garasu -> glass
洋盃　koppu -> cup (from Dutch “kop”)

Anyway, the Japanese language has always been a massive importer of foreign words. 50% of the vocabulary is of Chinese origin, and for the last few decades, Japanese speakers have been incorporating foreign (mostly English) words like there’s no tomorrow. It’s the nature of the language.

Why? Mostly because everyone does it. It’s a bit of a circular argument, but English slogans and brand names and whatnot are all around and people just get used to it and copy the pattern.

I guess you could make an argument from history. When Japan opened up in the 19th century, the apparent discrepancy between Japan and the west didn’t go unnoticed. To this day, the expression kurobune is still used, a reference to the black steel ships of Admiral Perry, to refer to disruptive events/technologies. There was a period of very aggressive incorporation of western knowledge and culture. Much vocabulary had to be created or imported to refer to the new ideas that were being introduced. Some Japanese scholars seriously suggested that the country ought to start using English, or French, or German instead of Japanese.

In this context, things that were European-sounding had an air of sophistication and coolness.

With the rise of imperialism in the 20th century, much of the English vocabulary was purged, but this was only a short-lived and superficial gesture. Yeah, cantines served 辛味入汁掛飯 (karami-iri-shiru-kake-gohan) but everyone knew it was kare-raisu (curry and rice).

After WW2 and with the American occupation, there was a new influx of western cultural goods. Looking to forget the war and the hardships, people gave companies and products English-sounding names to give off an air of American success. Eventually, even though individual loan words may have very short shelf lives, the general trend stuck to this day.

Historically, and culturally, English-speaking countries are in a very different situation but there are nevertheless a few similar examples. For instance why would an American ice-cream make give its company a fake European-sounding name? Why use the Japanese word for six for an American AV equipment maker? Why would a Silicon Valley cloud gaming startup use the Japanese word for open ocean for its service?

11

Are sure it comes from English gum and not from Spanish goma? There were a few Spaniards over there before Japan got closed to foreigners, often mixed with the Portuguese.

12

It actually comes from the Dutch gom. There aren’t there many Spanish loan words in Japanese, though there are a ton of Portuguese ones.

13

Makes sense. Still not from English, though, and still part of the reason there is so much “English” in Japanese is that a lot of those words aren’t from English, they’re from a different source which happens to be similar to English; English and that other source may have a common origin (gum, goma and gom come from a Latin word), they may have loaned to each other before one of them lended to Japanese, or it may be a word from a different language which some unfamiliar with this language thinks made up.

14

More examples:

The Russian band Pussy Riot uses English words written in the Roman alphabet as its name.

The slogan for Volkswagen in the U.S. during the 1990’s was the German word “Fahrvergnügen.”

15

That’s true for some words of Dutch origin, like gomu (gom), koppu (kop), garasu (glas), gasu (gas), kohi (koffie), biiru (bier), or pompu (pomp).

However, don’t underestimate the massive number of English words that have been adopted, and sometimes created. This is still different from random English (and occasionally French) sentences that are used in advertising, in the media, and in songs.

16

Although most (all?) of the responses in this thread are interesting and could be the starts of discussions in their own right, the closest to factual responses to the OP’s question are

and

although that is beginning to change because

17

Japan is different. I’ve worked in sales and marketing for more than 20 years here, and you have to have natives working with you to get it right.

I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that Korean will never, ever come close to knocking English off the top stop of foreign languages. A few years of Korean tv shows popular first among women in their 40s and 50s, and now in the 20s and 30s, and some interest in K-Pop will not translate into any influx of Korean loan words.

If one of my clients were to ask, I would tell them to bet the ranch on this never happening. Far too much/many technology, culture, movies, songs, business models, etc., etc., come from America.

18

Including that favorite Japanese dish, Tempura.

On a side note, I was really surprised recently to learn that the famous Indian dish, Vindaloo, is from Portuguese, too. Wine and garlic, duh!

We keep forgetting what maritime pioneers the Portuguese were in the 15th and 16th centuries.

19

Kinda off-topic, but I watch quite a bit of anime and I noticed a tendency to say a few English loan words as a couplet, such as “bye bye” and “love love.” Is there a reason for this?

20

Hmmmm, dunno, but Japanese has a tendency to repeat words for emphasis. For example, “toki-doki,” “iro-iro,” and “iyo-iyo.” Ah, these aren’t the best examples, but the point is Japanese likes repeating words, and it’s probably cute. A bit tipsy, gomen nasai (sorry).