Japan is famous as the home of hilarious “Engrish,” the mistaken English signs or T-shirts you often see on the Internet. The Japanese can be a very creative people, and this extends to the use of English for expressing ideas, like the shop near J-List which proclaims, “Splush! Is not only the problem of age,” which I’ve come to believe means something like, you can make a splash in life no matter how old you are. The other day I was contemplating Japan’s issues with using correct English while soaking in the bath after working out at the gym. I started to read the little signs that were posted all around me, which were in Japanese and English, and I was pleased to see that all of them had perfectly formed English with no errors at all. Then I realized that the few dozen times I’d encountered amusing Engrish online, it was generally with Chinese or sometimes Korean text in the frame rather than Japanese. The most famous Engrish phrase of our age (“Do Not Want”) is another example of this — it comes from a badly subtitled pirated copy of Star Wars Episode III from China, not from Japan. So the next time you see some amusing Engrish on the Internet, don’t automatically assume it comes from Japan — Engrish can happen anytime, anywhere.
A lot of bad Engrish is from China, not Japan. My Japanese staff asked me to pass this on.
