Type on the Japanese Street

I’ve been living in Japan for a few months now (my wife is an English teacher here) and it’s been very interesting getting familiar with the complex Japanese writing system. There are three “alphabets” (not counting the Roman characters used in many places) which are intermixed freely everywhere you look.

Japanese signage and writing style are fascinating in their variety. As in any other language, the styles vary from antique brush strokes to kitschy 50s sci-fi abstract to handwritten “cursive” that’s all but unreadable to the foreigner’s eye.

I’ve taken a few shots around town with my mobile phone camera to capture some of the interesting typographic tidbits I’ve noticed. I haven’t been as industrious as I had hoped, so I will also note here an interesting site that was pointed out to me by a Japanese friend who is one of the very active font identifiers on our WhatTheFont Forum.

Taquet’s Hatena Diary (English translation) is a Japanese blog devoted to showing photographs of type use in Japanese signage. Some notable recent samples:

	Typical boring sans combining all four alphabets: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and English.
	Rustic harvest font. This is katakana, the alphabet used for onomatopoeia and words of foreign origin. This one just says Harvest Fair: haabesuto fea.
	Avant garde “stylish” style. This is also katakana (“teatoru taimuzusukuea”) for Theatre Times Square.
	Kind of rough old-printing-press style being used to advertise… a banana dessert. Vertical Japanese is read top-to-bottom, right-to-left. The first two kanji (top right) are east and capital, otherwise known as Tokyo.

And now a few of my own from around town.

	Six renditions of the kanji for “eternity” — very similar to “water” 水.
	This ubiquitous sign is the brand of a delivery service. I enjoy how the cat logo at the top is simultaneously cute and disturbingly evil. Note the clever representation of the middle kanji (“hurry” 急) with the lower strokes turned into little running feet.
	Water 水 and tree 木 are drawn quite differently and normally look nothing alike. But in this blocky type, the only difference between them is the thin separation between the central vertical stroke and the “arms” — a clever representation.