The Japanese love to abbreviate long, hard to pronounce words. Whether its lopping off some kanji to change Tokyo Daigaku (Tokyo University) into the more manageable “Todai” or coining shortened terms like konkatsu, the “wedding activities” that are so popular with single people too busy to find potential marriage partners, the Japanese are efficient speakers. It’s also interesting to see how they create on-the-fly slang words for anything they like, shortening Starbucks to Sutaba or rendering the somewhat unwieldy title of Monster Hunter into the more concise Mon-han. They also use many of the abbreviations found in English, but find it easier to pronounce acronyms such as JAL (Japan Air Lines), ANA (All Nippon Airways), LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and even VIP as if they were normal words (e.g. “jal” “ana” “lax” and “vip”) rather than saying the letters individually, as we do in English. On the famous Japanese 2chan BBS, the sub-group that roughly corresponds to the /b/ board on 4chan is known as VIP (“vip”), and the Japanese version of /b/-tards are known as “vippers.”
I like this Starbuck’s logo better than the normal one.
