That’s right, Ghetto Happy Dining…and
of course it’s a really posh restaurant.

As a nation, Japan is absolutely fascinated with the English language. They give their products English names to make them sound foreign and exotic, they brand them using Roman letters to give them that distinctive trendy look, and they wear T-shirts with phrases that look as though they were produced by having a blindfolded person point to a series random words in a dictionary.

It wasn’t that long ago that learning a foreign language was looked upon with a great deal of suspicion. During Japan’s more isolationist days, anyone who spoke English too well was viewed as un-Japanese, something of a renegade. Now that the Japanese have really opened up to the west, however, they seem determined to make up for lost time by using and abusing the language in every way conceivably possible.

If you’ve ever traveled in Japan, you have no doubt seen the way English is plastered all over signs, advertisements, and T-shirts. The free-spirited brazenness with which it is used, unhindered by such petty things as “grammar”, makes linguists and English teachers around the world cringe in dismay, but it also provides plenty of entertainment for gaijin like myself.

Below is a sampling of a few of the things I ran into during my time in Japan that made me laugh. Read the rest of this entry »