Survey on Multilingual Signs from Japan’s Linguistic Landscape: Non-Japanese Viewpoints

Japan’s process of internationalization, as the increasing number of foreign residents and tourists shows, seems to be proceeding at an extraordinary speed. Within the process, Japanese authorities and citizens have to face many different types of problems: one of them is sociolinguistic. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted among non-Japanese native speakers concerning the quality of Japan’s linguistic landscape. Participants were asked to evaluate public and private multilingual signs. After the evaluation part, they were requested to answer three open questions to briefly explicate what they consider problematic of such signs. From the survey it was possible to observe a general disappointment, mainly at a linguistic level, due to the high number of “wrong” texts of both public and private domains. Although Japan is indeed going through a rapid internationalization, the results showed that on the whole, people from Western countries, or cultures, tended to point out the most problems; Eastern people seem to be more tolerant and do not tend to consider wrong signs something that might interfere with a country’s attempt to present an international face to the world.