Japanese Voice Over Agency

Everything you never needed to know about speaking Japanese

The Japanese language has no plurals
Plural language doesn’t exist in Japan. They just use the singular so it can be difficult to tell if they are talking about a mouse in your kitchen or some mice.

Articles
English speakers can get confused when they realise there isn’t any word for ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’ in Japanese. It does take foreigners who are used to using articles some time to get the hang of it.

Deer not Dogs
In the streets of Nara, Japan the people don’t have to worry about dogs roaming around because instead they have tame Deer. They are called Sika Deer and they will take food crackers from residents and tourists who want to feed them. The Deer is classified as a national treasure in Japan.

Finger Lickin’ Good
The Japanese have a tradition on Christmas Eve of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some people are able to order the meals in the weeks running up to Christmas eve, whilst other people queue up outside the restaurants. It’s estimated that 3.6 million Japanese people enjoy fried chicken at this time.

Take your clothes off
If you happen to be a man in Japan in February you might be able to take part in one of the many Hadaka Matsuri Festivals that place including a famous one on Honshu Island. All the men are naked apart from their loincloths and they brave the freezing weather to celebrate prosperity and fertility. At the start of the festival the men plunge into icy cold water and then they try to catch one of two wooden sticks which are thrown into the crowd by a priest as a lucky talisman.

Have a break
In Japan you can buy green tea flavoured kit kats to go in your lunchbox. The Japanese like a quirky flavour. You’ll also find Kit Kats in other flavours like wasabi, banana, ginger ale and sweet potato.

Singing floors
If you visit the Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan you’ll hear a sound like a bird’s tweet when you walk on certain parts of the floor. It’s called a Nightingale floor and it was very popular in Castles and Temples and used to deter intruders. The singing sound comes from the way the floor was installed to make the flooring nails rub against clamps in the wood.

Eat tinned food in a restaurant
There are restaurants and bars in Japan that specialise in serving tinned food to their customers. They have tins of different recipes from all round the world and you choose which can you want to dine from.

Waterproof letters
A town called Susami in Wakayama is the place you’ll find the world’s deepest underwater post box. It is located at a depth of 10 metres and its used by divers who want to send postcards with this unique postal address. The divers buy the cards at the diving store. The cards are water-resistant and the divers use oil-based plant marker to write their messages. The cards are picked up every few days and then transferred in the traditional fashion. Each year the post box has between 1,000 and 1,500 pieces of mail.

Don’t worry about your ice cream melting
If you eat ice cream in Japan during the summer months, you don’t have to worry about it melting quickly. Non-melting ice cream takes so long to melt that you’ve finished it by the time that happens. Ice cream is another food that gets the wacky flavour treatment. You can enjoy eel flavour, soy sauce or garlic.

A short history on the Japanese language

Experts are unsure about the early origins of the Japonic language family. Although written Japanese has been heavily influenced by Chinese, the spoken language isn’t related to any other languages. The most popular theory is that it is part of the Ural-Altaic family, along with Turkish, Mongolian and Korean.

The development of the language is usually split into the following periods:

Old Japanese (up to 1000 BCE) – during this time Japanese was considerably influenced by Chinese, through the spread of Buddhism.

Middle Japanese (1000 – 1700 BCE) – while the written language became more standardised, different dialects developed throughout the country. After the capital moved from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1292, the Tokyo dialect became the spoken standard. Contact with the Portuguese at the end of the 16th century had a significant influence on the language; the Portuguese also compiled the first Japanese dictionary.

Modern Japanese (from 1700 BCE onwards) – when the American Admiral Perry visited Japan in 1868, he introduced the Japanese to English and other Western languages, and so began a flow of new loanwords.

Which countries have Japanese as a national language?

Japanese has no actual official status in Japan, but is the country’s de facto national language.

How many people speak Japanese as their first language?

Around 130 million people speak Japanese as their first language, making it the ninth most commonly spoken native language in the world. The vast majority of these live in Japan, although there are significant communities of people in the United States, Brazil, Canada and Australia who speak Japanese as their first language.

It is spoken widely as a second language in Korea, Taiwan, parts of China and the Philippines – a hangover from Japanese occupation of this region during the Second World War.

Did you know…

• The Japanese writing system uses three different character sets: kanji (Chinese characters – around 40% of modern Japanese characters are based on these), hiragana and katakana. The latter two together are known as kana, and consist of 46 characters each.
• There are still many different dialects spoken in Japan. Some of the dialects used in the more isolated regions – such as Kagoshima – can be unintelligible to speakers from other parts of the country. The language spoken on the Ryūkyū islands is considered different enough by experts to be a separate branch of the Japonic language family.
• Different words and expressions are used in different social contexts, to reflect relative social positions (eg jobs, age), depending on who is speaking to whom. An honorific form of the language (keigo) is still commonly used in very formal situations.

The Japanese economy

The Japanese economy is the third largest in the world by nominal GDP. Japan is the world’s third largest manufacturer of automobiles, and has the largest electronics goods industry, with a focus on high-tech products.

Japan has few natural resources, so most of the raw materials necessary for its manufacturing industries are imported. Japan has one of the lowest rates of food self-sufficiency of all industrialised countries, importing around 60% of its food. Rice and fish are notable exceptions.

Japan is a member of the G8 and the World Trade Organisation.