Why are the Japanese so bad at English?

‘Shhh! Now on face to respectable great eels life’. How’s that for the first line of an article? I spotted this gem written on a sign in the window of a seafood restaurant in the Hibiya Midtown shopping centre in Tokyo recently. I was delighted. I’ve spent 25 years in Japan and have always enjoyed a good bit of mangled Japanese English. I had been dismayed of late by an apparent improvement in the quality of English on signs and noticeboards around Tokyo. But this was the old stuff. This was ‘Engrish’.

Terrible English on packaging, signs, clothing and shop fronts is hardly a uniquely Japanese phenomenon of course, but it has been elevated into something of an art form here. There are websites devoted to the most amusing examples, where you can find such pearls as a notice in a park telling us to ‘Keep away from smiling grass’; a bollard labelled ‘No porking’, a billboard welcoming us to the ‘Moron Café’ and a property company called ‘Sexy House’.