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The 46th “The Future of Central Eurasia and Japan” public lecture was held on Wednesday, December 20, 2023. We invited Dr. Iwata Kazunari, a professor in the Department of Japanese Language and Literature in the School of Modern Liberal Arts of University of the Sacred Heart, to give a lecture titled “Why are there no hiragana on road signs?”

Dr. Iwata participated in the Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers as a Japanese language teacher and also worked at the Japan Foundation Japanese- Language Institute, Urawa. In addition, he has provided training for staff at the Immigration and Residence Management Agency of the Ministry of Justice, and has been involved in the preparation of “Easy Japanese Guidelines” to support the agency’s residency program.

The lecture began with an introduction of Dr. Iwata’s latest paper on the types of romanization of public signs in Taiwan and the problems with temporary shelter pictograms.

Next, he explained the problem of romanization in road signs. According to the survey, 84.3% of foreigners living in Japan can read hiragana, while 51.5% can read romaji. Hiragana is also the easiest writing system for Japanese children to read. Nevertheless, road signs are written in modified Hepburnian romaji and kanji together by order of GHQ, and hiragana is not used. On the other hand, since the format of the display of station names has been decided since the Meiji era, the hiragana name is still used after the war. 
There are many problems with the romanization of road signs. For example, Japanese signs are full of abbreviations such as sta., stn. (=station), and E. (=east), but research has shown that even English speakers have difficulty understanding these abbreviations. In addition, other problems were also cited. ①Even within the same sign, English and Roman characters are mixed up in different ways, such as “Iidabashi” for Iidabashi, “Kanda Bridge” for Kanda Bridge, and “Nijyubashi Bridge” for Nijyubashi Bridge. ②Even though foreigners living in Japan are not all native English speakers, unnecessarily difficult English words are used. ③In many cases, there is no long-syllabic notation, and as a result, different place names are written in the same romanization.

It was also pointed out that multilingual signs other than English tend to be used disproportionately for “unpleasant signs” such as “police officer standing guard” or “security camera in operation,” and that behind this is the prejudice that “foreigners = people who do not follow the rules”. As examples of this improvement, we were introduced to examples from other countries where signs are written only in pictograms or only in the local language and English.

In conclusion, it was important to understand that romaji is a system for displaying the sounds of Japanese, not for displaying English translations, and that sounds and writing are separate things, and that there are rules for writing each type of character, such as hiragana, romaji, and English.

After the lecture, there was a lively Q&A session, with many questions about the challenges of introducing hiragana on road signs and issues surrounding the acceptance of easy-to-understand Japanese, as well as many comments.