From Kanji to Romaji

The Japanese writing system is an amazing combination of different characters. It is not at all uncommon to see a sign that makes use of kanji, hiragana, katakana, Arabic numerals and romaji/English.  This “Cat Park” sign, for example, is in no way out of the ordinary, although it uses all these.

The hiragana in this photo is a little hard to see, but it is there

In addition to these writing systems, written Japanese (like many other languages) is accompanied by a variety of symbols; some created in Japan and some (like the P for parking in the "Cat Park" photo) borrowed from other countries. Some of these symbols are easily recognized by Westerners, for example, restroom symbols. But some of them are not used in the US and do not have immediately understandable meanings. The red triangle often seen in windows of large buildings, for example. I eventually had to ask some of my Japanese friends what this symbol means because I couldn't figure it out.

Turns out it marks windows that can be used as an emergency exit, but not all my Japanese friends know this so it may not be as useful as one might hope.

There are also symbols that Westerners associate with a different meaning from what the Japanese associate them with. The most dramatic of these is the swastika. Like any American who doesn't know what this symbol means in Asia, my first thought when I first saw a swastika on a map of Japan was that it was somehow related to Hitler. Of course I figured out that that wasn't what it meant pretty quickly and it's not identical to the WWII swastika but, at first, Japanese maps looked quite unfriendly to me:

All these different characters and symbols come together to make a written language very different from written American English. It is true that written English uses the Roman Alphabet, Arabic numerals and various symbols, but it doesn't have the same effect. The visual texture of written English comes mainly from the use of different fonts and colors, not from using different characters altogether, and it seems like more of the information has to be in the words themselves, not how they are written. Using so many different modes of visual communication may seem a bit cumbersome, but it does not slow Japanese people down at all. In fact, if anything they seem to absorb information from text more quickly than Americans do, and it's possible this may be partly due to the additional information they receive from how a word is written. So, what seems confusing and overwhelming to foreigners is actually helpful to Japanese people.