Dumb question: English lettering on Japanese products

[jperryss]

This has been irking me for awhile. Why would a product that was originally released in Japan, made by a Japanese company, have mostly English print on it? Yet when I see American made stuff (what's left of it anyway) all the print isn't in Japanese?

http://microkit.free.fr/Nintendo/Nes/famicom.jpg

I'm missing something ridiculously obvious, aren't I?

[myuusmeow]

This has been irking me for awhile. Why would a product that was originally released in Japan, made by a Japanese company, have mostly English print on it? Yet when I see American made stuff (what's left of it anyway) all the print isn't in Japanese?

http://microkit.free.fr/Nintendo/Nes/famicom.jpg

I'm missing something ridiculously obvious, aren't I?

Yeah. The only thing in English on there is "FAMILY COMPUTER tm" and "NINTENDO". I see 3 patches of Japanese text in that picture, 1 next to each controller and 1 below the FC text.

[jperryss]

I know, but the big FAMILY COMPUTER print is like dead center on the thing. It's the first thing that grabs your attention when you look at it. Why is it English? I find that odd.

And on top of that, why English and not something else? The NES, which looked completely different anyway, didn't hit the states until 3 years later.

[Life of Brian]

Well, for stuff like clothes, I think it's a fashion thing. As for electronics, I dunno.

[CronoTriggerfan]

This has bugged me for a while, too. Even on many Japanese novels and comics, it'll read "HUGE ENGLISH TEXT" then little kanji subscript that says the same thing only much tinier. Seeing as English is pretty much mandatory over there, and Western culture has pretty much engulfed their culture, I suppose it's not too odd, but still...

CTFan

[Triton]

english is popular lol

[dman762000]

Believe it or not english is a required class in most japenese schools and the thing is that there are actually a lot of Americans living in japan, so that is one explanation, another is have you looked those things up in Japanese, it looks toatlly different, and maybe they are going for some kind of appearence thing, and then there is the whole culture assimilation thing, they love anything american, hell you can make a butt load of money just selling jeans over there, real american jeans, they prefer levi's as they are more iconish of america.

[Shadeslayer]

Well also its because the Name of NES is Nintendo and it is a made up name. They (Nintendo) didn't make a name for it in every language so Japanese just use Nintendo, just like we do.

[Super Cameraman]

This sort of annoys me. Even when they talk, it's like:

"japenesejapenesejapenesejapeneseSUPER MARIO BROTHERSjapenesejapenesejapenesejapenesejapenese"

-Super

[Master of Portables]

heck, I got this Japanese game for my DS,Osu! Tateakea! Ouendon! and it even has some words in English. (ok, so it was imported, but even in the non imported version it has the word GO in English...)

[Gump-in-space]

Isn't there like 200 letters in japanese? That would be kind of hard to fit on a keyboard.

[Harshboy]

Isn't there like 200 letters in japanese? That would be kind of hard to fit on a keyboard.

That would be why they put English letters on their keyboards

[Skyone]

Not many people do realize that English is a basically a mandatory second language, and that 97% of Japan knows English. Not too sure why English parades over Japanese half of the time, but I'm not one too complain.

[Master of Portables]

no wonder the Japanese DS (old one) has POWER in English letters on the power button... and the start and select buttons have START and SELECT on them...