Japanese Typography on the Web and Beyond (deep stuff)

[Steve Bildermann]

I've heard foreigners compare their first experience in Japan to everything from Disneyworld to The Planet of the Apes. Neither is particularly flattering or accurate, but they reflect the disorienting and uncanny similarities and differences with their own culture that provide years of surprise for even the most jaded expatriate.

Japanese typography, especially for the web, can induce a similar experience for Western-trained designers. Many of the typographic rules we've learned and broken must be restated or discarded as irrelevant. Some typographic parameters that we've manipulated to great effect are no longer available, but are replaced by exciting new ones.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111

The art of the Brush and the Paper

[Taro Toporific]

http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111

Engrish apologist and spawn of the aka oni, Chris Palmieri: What a chickenshit!

Engrish errors ALWAYS result in serious damage to the client's reputation because it ALWAYS ends up on engrish.com, blogs and Jay Leno. It's a gRobal world. Sheesh.
The only valid point he makes is "Are there any strategic advantages to the copy in question that trump usage concerns?"

...Moreover, any righteousness based in grammatical accuracy rather than content strategy is dubious at best. And so I submit the following guidelines for managing such delicate situations:

Before offering unsolicited advice ask yourself:

* Is the text intended to be read by English-speaking audiences?
* Will errors result in serious damage to the client's reputation?
* Will errors cause crucial usability or safety hazards?

If the answer to any of the above is yes,

* Is it possible to submit this advice respectfully and constructively?
* Without committing to any undesirable duties?
* Without sacrificing my design responsibilities?
* Am I prepared for a polite declination?
* Are there any strategic advantages to the copy in question that trump usage concerns?

[Socratesabroad]

[Taro Toporific]

In those immortal words, Taro, I'll second that emotion.

Ok, I'm not totally hardcore: The JR East's ad campaign "Traing(tm)" is ok for the Japanese market.

It's just EVERYDAY at work I gotta put up with products named "HYMEN", "UPASS", "GODCODE," and worse.

[Charles]

:arrow: The art of the Brush and the Paper

There is a special hell reserved for French "calligraphers" who think that they can slop sumi around a sheet of paper and charge 500 euros for it.



Since I'm an artist and painter, I've spent a of a lot time studying shodou over the years, from the most traditional to the most radical modern stuff, and IMNSHO this guy doesn't know squat about any of it. I am probably a better calligrapher than he is, but I sure wouldn't be so stupid as to believe that anyone would actually have any interest in seeing my shodou, let alone buying it.

Some people have all the nerve.

[Taro Toporific]

:arrow: The art of the Brush and the Paper

There is a special hell reserved for French "calligraphers" who think that they can slop sumi around a sheet of paper and charge 500 euros for it..

In Amsterdam, I had a good time joshing the tourists in Japanese at this inspired Bling.

[Charles]

In Amsterdam, I had a good time joshing the tourists in Japanese at this inspired Bling.

ha.. you remind me of something.. I took a FG friend of mine to the Art Institute of Chicago, to see a couple of particularly nice surimono from the Frank Lloyd Wright collection. But they weren't on display in the Asian wing as usual, they were relocated up to a "blockbuster" exhibit of Mary Cassatt, to show how she was influenced by ukiyo-e. I was going to explain about surimono to my friend, and then I noticed a sign I have never seen in any museum before (or since), "No Lecturing."

Mary Cassatt, despite being the darling of women artists everywhere, was a pretty piss poor artist, but at least she seems to have understood Japanese printmaking better than anyone else in the Impressionist era.

[Taro Toporific]

[cpalmieri]

Thanks everyone for your interest in my article. I hope that even those of you who disagree with parts of it can find other parts that are useful.

The use of English in Japanese design is a tough issue, and has taken me 3 years to find peace with. I think it takes a while for Gaijin to understand their role in the Japanese media environment, i.e. they have none.

Aside from the small handful of E/J bilingual sites and the usual Gaijin rags, none of the advertisements, food packaging, graphic t-shirts, etc. are designed with us in mind. Therefore laughter and derision, though self-satisfying for some, is entirely irrelevant to Japanese copywriters and their audiences.

I challenge any of you to provide evidence of where a listing on Engrish.com or a Jay Leno joke has caused measurable damage to a company's bottom line.

As a design professional, I pick my battles based on the needs and perceptions of the intended audience. If I feel the English text in question will make the site difficult to use or unattractive to those who use it, I'll bring it up with the client. If I can't find any plausible way it could negatively impact the user's experience, I let it go. If that makes me a "chickenshit" or an "apologist", then those are labels I can live with.

p.s. If anyone is interested, you can find both articles at my website. I'll be posting more on the subject over the next few weeks as well.

[Mulboyne]

This issue is something of a moving target so it might be risky to "make your peace" quite so easily.
Certainly, foreigners are not the target for the examples you describe but consider that many western companies also use kanji, arabic, russian etc for their design appeal alone. If a major company discovers that it is misusing foreign scripts in a way that creates offence or unintended humour then it is normal corporate practice to make the necessary changes immediately. And the design team that cleared the idea is given a kick in the pants.
I can't give you an example of a Japanese company losing business through exposure on Jay Leno or engrish.com but there is undoubtedly a cummulative loss of credibility for corporate Japan as regular misuse of English reinforces the image of "those wacky Japanese".
It is also questionable whether a company can ever be certain that "this is only intended for Japanese". One problem that I see crop up is when Japanese companies have not produced any English language material. They will hand out sales brochures, annual reports and product catalogues to foreign counterparts who have approached them saying "Sorry, this is only in Japanese". But, often, eccentric English is staring the foreigner in the face and, when it is really bad, it raises a question in the mind about just how competent the company is. Since some of the best business deals come from unexpected directions, this is not healthy for either side.
When the Keidanren ask foreign business groups in Japan how to improve the image of Japanese businesses in the world, the same answers top the list - improve accounting transparency and stop using bad English. The Keidanren generally ignored this advice but now they are serious about it. It's possible that poor English skills are becoming more of a national embarassment as China and India take up larger roles in the world economy. Whatever the causes, I think the standards for what constitutes damage to a company's reputation are only going to get tighter. And rightly so.

[cpalmieri]

Mulboyne,

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your post, your points are well taken.

You are right in that this issue won't be resolved anytime soon, and Japan obviously has a lot of work to do in English education and use, and the corporate world is no exception. I imagine that the B2B scenarios you present are real and problematic. If the copywriter/publisher/corporate wordsmith is outright ignoring a sizable chunk of it's potential audience, that is surely negligent and impermissible.

What I've come to peace with is, my initial horror at every snippet of English on a coffee can or subway poster. Sure, maybe some of it didn't "speak to me" as a consumer, but after many conversations with Japanese friends and collegues, I realize it spoke to them, and that they were the primary audience.

Each communications project has a different demographic makeup and different goals, and in many of these, Engrish is harmless and in some cases, even advantageous.

Finally, I should remind you that my articles were written for native English-speaking graphic designers, not copywriters or educators. Considering the many other potential non-language battles a designer may face throughout a project, and the fact that Native-English ability does not make anyone an expert in marketing or copywriting strategy, I concluded that Engrish-related complaints and suggestions by these designers must be voiced with caution and selectivity.
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[mjvoss]

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world. ~H. L. Mencken, The American Language



Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and critique essays.
~George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

[Mulboyne]

Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world. ~H. L. Mencken, The American Language

Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and critique essays.
~George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

You can quote great men and women but whether they speak for you or against you depends on what you say yourself

[Socratesabroad]

Snipe away at the grammarians all you wish, mjvoss. For starters, you're apparently not in Japan (unless Chicago's geography has changed or you're a liar) and you are likely to have never seen the twisted and tortured soul of English at the hands of most Japanese (Chinese do fare a bit better thanks to sentence structure).

It is an old observation that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules. After he has learned, by their guidance, to write plain English adequate for everyday uses, let him look, for the secrets of style, to the study of the masters of literature.

[cpalmieri]

Before this devolves into a slapping match, I'd like to recommend one more article on this subject for those of you who haven't made up your minds yet:

My boss is a 48-year-old housewife from Niigata Prefecture [v-2.org]

The author Adam Greenfield spent 3 years in Japan working as an Information Architect.

[Mulboyne]

You really can't get too far out ahead of your users, not if you want them to accept, understand, and feel comfortable using what you've built.

I don't think anyone can disagree with that. The article points to the other reputation at stake, namely, yours. A UK magazine once turned down a very lucrative advertising contract with a Japanese financial company because the copy which had been approved at head office was so absurd that the magazine determined it would reflect badly on them for running it. When the company declined to change the copy, they decided the customer wasn't always right.
When you made your peace, I would think you probably balanced the risks to a client's reputation with the risks to your own reputation and business in being associated with a particular project. That is a reasonable way to act. I think, however, that balance is worthy of constant re-evaluation since you can too easily become "the dog that didn't bark" when standards change.

I appreciate that your articles are primarily focused on the issues of typography rather than the appropriateness of English usage so these comments are at a tangent to the main points you raise. Thanks for posting on the web so we all get to read them.

[kamome]

Wow, this is one of the most erudite threads to come our of FG since it started. I learned a thing or two reading the articles and everyone's comments.

[cpalmieri]

Mulboyne,

You're absolutely right, constant re-evaluation of even our deepest convictions is the only way to maintain any professional integrity we earn along the way.

I'm glad that these articles stimulated some discussion; it's a great motivator for me to finish up the next few currently in the works.

By the way, if anyone knows of any related resources (Japanese website design, + CSS, + Japanese typography, etc.), I'd love to hear about them. I've found very little in my travels.

[Socratesabroad]