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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1095

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Multilingualism in Tokyo: Balancing exoticism and accessibility

Authors: Hagiwara, Akiko; Kai, Motofumi
Submitted by: Hagiwara, Akiko (Tokyo U. of Pharmacy and Life Sciences, Japan)

Being one of the largest cities in the world, Tokyo has a considerable number of non-Japanese citizens, sojourners, business travelers, students, and tourists from all over the world. There were more than 8.6 million visitors to Japan in 2010; 2.4 millions were from Korea, 2.7 millions from PRC and Taiwan, and the rest were from various other countries. Among them, 5.9 million people visited Tokyo. Reflecting the growing number of visitors, the way this city looks has changed during the past few decades. Most major train stations now have signs in four languages: Japanese, English, Korean and Chinese, and this change has been propelled by top-down decisions. Tokyo Metropolitan government has imposed some measures to use these four languages in public signs to promote tourism. These top-down approaches make visible changes, but multilingualism at a grassroots level has not received much attention.

In terms of convenience and accessibility, multilingual signs and messages are an important aspect in travel industry, but, on the other hand, unintelligible signs surely provide the feel of exoticism. As long as practical problems do not occur, monolingual signs can add to the enjoyment of being abroad.

Here arises a question: What if not being able to read signs and notices in public places causes some problem or discomfort? We turned our eyes to public restrooms. They have to be accessible to everybody, but it is less accessible because of the invention of rather culture-specific modern devices equipped in the restroom. As the results, unlike most restrooms elsewhere, Japanese restrooms typically have many written messages, mostly instructions of how to use various devices. Ever since TOTO, a Japanese toilet bowl company, started marketing their best-seller “washlets” and the “sound princesses,” using a restroom has become something that takes some getting used to. Now most Japanese know how to use them and other devices without reading the instructions, so instructions are actually more needed in languages other than Japanese. We have decided to investigate the languages used in signs and instructions in public restrooms.

The main purpose of our study is to document the present status of written messages in public restrooms in Tokyo and to argue that written messages found in the restroom reflect the general public’s unwillingness towards multilingualism.

As the method, we have collected digital photos of restroom signs, including signs outside and inside the restroom, messages, instructions, and warnings found in restrooms. In order to balance the corpus, we are systematically collecting data from seven major categories: museums, hotels, restaurants, pubic buildings, shops, theaters, transportation facilities. The data were categorized based on the languages used and their extent (Backhaus, 2007). Though we are still compiling the database, we can report that the language used in restroom was more monolingual than we expected, which suggests general public in Tokyo are not as open to visitors as much as the government wishes.

References:

Backhaus, Peter (2007) Linguistic Landscapes. A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo. Clevedon–Buffalo–Toronto: Multilingual Matters.