Why is the Japanese first edition stamp in English?
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That’s a good question
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Why are the illustrator names in English?
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Why do old backs say Pocket Monsters Card Game on the back?
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Olipa beauty item
I believe it’s a direct translation of pokemon or something along those lines
Maybe because Media Factory expected Japanese children to understand very basic English and thought it’s cool and trendy.
Strange concept for monolinguistic Muricans, I know…
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No idea why it’s in English but the katakana ポケットモンスタ reads as Poketto Monsutā and is where we got the Romanized form Pocket Monsters from. The original name was going to be カプセモン which reads as Kapusemon or Capsumon, but Tajiri decided against that in the end.
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My theory is that it’s because Japanese is hard and 1st is universal (or at least easy to extrapolate from because Japan uses Arabic numerals too). 初版 is the term for the first printing of something, and it is used sometimes in reference to Pokemon. I mean you can search ポケモンカード初版 on YAJ and get plenty of results even though saying 1st or 1ED is more common
How do you say first car in english? First car.
Japanese? 初めての車… unless you mean the first car in a train? Then it’s 一号車
How do you say first of the month in english? 1st or first.
Japanese? １日
How do you say first without any context in English? 1st or first.
Japanese? 最初… or 一番… or 初?
My point is that numerals are easy and Japanese usually requires context so labeling everything in all languages with the same 1st edition keeps everything easy for everyone. Also @muk is probably right and it’s just cool. Am I looking too much into this? Probably
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@muk is indeed correct. English is trendy in Japan. In addition, a lot of Japanese words come directly from English, but just pronounced like Japanese people would. They have a lot of words like that. In Japan they have three different alphabets:
- Hiragana (46 characters - or 71 including diacritics). This is their basic alphabet like we have our 26 letters. This alphabet is used for all basic Japanese words.
- Katakana (46 characters as well). The pronunciation of these ‘letters’ are exactly the same as Hiragana, but this alphabet is exclusively used for loanwords from other languages, mostly English.
- Kanji (50,000+ characters). All have a different meaning, and most have multiple pronunciations. These are all characters that look like Chinese characters. In elementary, middle, and high school Japanese students usually learn little over 2,000 of these Kanji characters, known as the ‘regularly used kanji’. There are more than 50,000 of these characters though, but even most native Japanese people don’t know nearly that many.
The Katakana alphabet is used for all those words that come from English. They’re still not actual English words or pronunciations though. More like Japanese words that are based off English words.
Of course, this still doesn’t explain the actual English words in our own 26-letter alphabet. In general, actual English words in Japan is mainly used to stand out and look cool. Most Japanese people only hear and see Japanese for most of their day, so it stands out. Just like in a lot of countries these days, English is simply part of the Japanese culture. Not just used in Pokémon, but also in other manga/anime, and even in just billboards on the streets.
Sources:
- Interesting on-topic read in general: gogonihon.com/en/blog/japanese-characters/
- Explanation of the characters: gogonihon.com/en/blog/japanese-characters/
- My little brother
He’s been studying Japanese for the past 6+ months, and he talks about it on a daily basis.
@nish is indeed also correct that there are usually a lot of different ways depending on the context to say/write something in Japanese, where we would just have a single word or expression in English (or Dutch for that matter). Even verbs and nouns change depending on for example how many people we’re talking about (one, two, a couple, a big group, etc.); how big/small something is; who we’re directing to (including the age of that person); etc. I can’t give any examples of this, but my little brother talked about this a few times.
Greetz,
Quuador
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An easy example would be just how to say “no”. You can’t just say “no” because that’s already a word, の… or more specifically it’s most commonly used as a grammatical tool that can take several different forms including indicating possession similar to 's in English.
So how do you say no? The most direct translation is いいえ(iie), however that is very blunt and can come across as offensive depending on who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about. いや(iya) and ううん(uun) are both much more casual ways of saying no, and いや(iya) is sometimes used as an interjection placeholder word like how we say “well…” in English instead of just flat out saying no. 違う(chigau) is a common conversational replacement for いいえ(iie) as it essentially means “not the case” however as is pretty much always the case in Japanese, it’s not always that simple. Chigau and iie are often used together in sentences and are not 100% interchangeable. 無理(muri) is no to an impossible degree that’s pretty much casual exclusive. Asking out a girl who is way out of your league? 無理. Asking someone to run away and leave the country to travel the world starting in 2 hours? 無理. Asking to trade toothbrushes? 無理. I could keep going with words like ダメ and ちょっと but I think you get the point by now
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Ah, I indeed hear this one in anime pretty often. Sometimes with the subtitles ‘no’ and sometimes with ‘hell no’ depending on the context. 
Greetz,
Quuador
Mhm, it’s used for comedic effect a lot in anime because there’s essentially no coming back once you’re slapped with the 無理 
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Why is the move text on English EX cards in Japanese, but on the Japanese cards it’s in English? Looks terrible.
Are you referring to Megas? My guesss is for the same reason as the 1st ed stamp
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