Why do Japanese cards have english on them?

[ecruteak]

I know with XY era EX cards the Japanese card has English text and the English card has Japanese text.

For example, Charizard EX from Generations says “HEAT TYPHOON” on the card, whereas the English release has the attack name in Japanese.

[maverick75]

"The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: modified Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana. The latin alphabet is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when entering Japanese text into a computer. "

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language

[KingPokemon]

@hersheycardcollector

I’ve always wondered, even as a kid, why Japanese cards had english words like Trainer, Goods, Pocket Monster Card Game…ect. Anybody have any ideas?

Maybe there’s not a Japanese word for “TRAINER”? If there is then why would a game created by Japanese in Japan not use it?

[surfnsnow]

I also wonder why the Japanese illustrators names are given in English on the Japanese cards?!

[mjisaacs]

From what I’ve heard this can relate back to Japanese anime as well (I don’t watch it but I have friends that do). Most anime’s will use English names for attacks and other high end “things” within the show. According to my friends, In Japan it’s considered “cool” when they hear something in English. Why? I have absolutely no idea, but that could be part of the reason, at least for the XY attacks anyways. It may also explain why English Base Set is more popular than Japanese if people are buying more English cards just for the fact that they are “cooler”. I don’t know if I was accurately describe my thoughts but I hope that made sense to everyone!

Mjisaacs

[null_user]

Using English words is “cool” so that’s probably the simple reason. In the same way that people in other languages will use words like “cool” and “shit” and “cute”. Even the Japanese tend to use English words for products and advertising cause of it, though sometimes it turns out really weird lol. Usually has very little to do with wether or not there’s a word for it in Japanese though.

Hell maybe it’s for the best to have a “simple” English name, instead of full on Japanese card type name. Going full Kanji with furigana might be less appealing to kids, though they already use it card descriptions… Idk I’m just rambling lol.

[KingPokemon]

@mjisaacs

From what I’ve heard this can relate back to Japanese anime as well (I don’t watch it but I have friends that do). Most anime’s will use English names for attacks and other high end “things” within the show. According to my friends, In Japan it’s considered “cool” when they hear something in English. Why? I have absolutely no idea, but that could be part of the reason, at least for the XY attacks anyways. It may also explain why English Base Set is more popular than Japanese if people are buying more English cards just for the fact that they are “cooler”. I don’t know if I was accurately describe my thoughts but I hope that made sense to everyone!

Mjisaacs

Clear as glass brother;)

[ottoman]

@mjisaacs

From what I’ve heard this can relate back to Japanese anime as well (I don’t watch it but I have friends that do). Most anime’s will use English names for attacks and other high end “things” within the show. According to my friends, In Japan it’s considered “cool” when they hear something in English. Why? I have absolutely no idea, but that could be part of the reason, at least for the XY attacks anyways. It may also explain why English Base Set is more popular than Japanese if people are buying more English cards just for the fact that they are “cooler”. I don’t know if I was accurately describe my thoughts but I hope that made sense to everyone!

Mjisaacs

True. It is the same in any Asia countries.

In China we call it 外國的月亮特別圓 meaning “the moon looks better when you are abroad”.

[null_user]

@ottoman

@mjisaacs

From what I’ve heard this can relate back to Japanese anime as well (I don’t watch it but I have friends that do). Most anime’s will use English names for attacks and other high end “things” within the show. According to my friends, In Japan it’s considered “cool” when they hear something in English. Why? I have absolutely no idea, but that could be part of the reason, at least for the XY attacks anyways. It may also explain why English Base Set is more popular than Japanese if people are buying more English cards just for the fact that they are “cooler”. I don’t know if I was accurately describe my thoughts but I hope that made sense to everyone!

Mjisaacs

True. It is the same in any Asia countries.

In China we call it 外國的月亮特別圓 meaning “the moon looks better when you are abroad”.

That’s cos it’s the only place you can see it most evenings.

[shizzlemetimbers]

Yeah I’ve always wondered as well! It is interesting that even prior to the release in 1996 even before the cards were popular and before they could even imagine selling them overseas, all the prototype artwork featured English text elements. There was obviously a conscious effort, the ‘cool’ effect that people describe makes sense!

[Quuador]

English words are used quite a lot in Japanese anime (so I’m assuming in daily conversations in Japan as well). I’m currently watching loads and loads of Japanese anime, and they use English words pretty often in combination with Japanese. You also hear it a lot in the intro and outro songs of animes, and see it in the anime itself in textform.

Using English words can be considered “cool” / “trendy”, and it is probably done mostly by the youth in Japan. The pronunciation of words is usually different as well, and sometimes English words in Japan have a slightly different meaning.

As for using English words, it’s actually not that different from other countries (like The Netherlands where I live). Companies, commercials, ads, etc. all have loads of English in them. We also have a lot of words that originate from the English language (as well as some from the French, German, Spanish, Italian, etc. languages). This is done probably almost everywhere in the world where there is contact (trading / business) with neighboring countries.
In Japanese it just sounds a bit weird in my honest opinion, because English sounds so different compared to Japanese. Still, in the Japanese alphabet and vocabulary they also use letters and words from the Chinese language, and as we’ve just concluded, also letters from the regular alphabet and words from the English language.

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Here is also a similar question for Japanese anime in general and a great answer, which I will both quote here:

Why do some anime in Japanese contain English?

It seems that many anime and manga aired or printed in Japanese, before they are dubbed or localized, contain English text or lyrics.

I’ve tagged a couple of examples here.

The first is from Digimon Tamers, wherein there are a couple English lines within the otherwise Japanese title sequence:

And another example from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where the text on the monitors is printed in English:

There are countless other examples (one I couldn’t find was another scene from Tamers in which a beer can reads “BEER”); so, my question is:

Why do these English words make their way into otherwise entirely Japanese productions?

Source: anime.stackexchange.com/q/835/37067

There are two different ways that one can use English words in Japanese.

The first is through loanwords. The Japanese language was more-or-less standardized during the Meiji Restoration, in the late 19th century. Before that, Japan was a very isolated culture for a very long time, so a lot of concepts simply didn’t exist in the language. As a result, it was decided that rather than creating new words for all of these concepts, they would just borrow the words from other languages. Most of the words came from English, though there are also some from other western languages.

In this case, the words are written in katakana (カタカナ). There are a very large number of loanwords, but it’s fairly standardized what is a loanword and what is not. Also, some of the words are pronounced differently in Japanese than English (e.g. energy becomes エネルギ (enerugi) with a hard g sound). In case it’s ambiguous how to pronounce English words in Japanese, these are also usually standardized.

That doesn’t really represent a use of English, though. The loanwords are borrowed from English, but both the meanings and pronunciations can be radically different from the English words. They’re better described as Japanese words which are based off English words. The examples you’ve given don’t really fall into the above category, but there are many examples like this so it’s worth mentioning.

The other way they can use English is just by writing/speaking in English. The examples you’ve given seem to fall in this category. This is done to sound/look cool, because most people in Japan only hear and see Japanese for most of their day, so it stands out. Since most Japanese people have at least a passable knowledge of English vocabulary (it’s part of the standard curriculum), it’s a way to make a statement, sort of like how stylized fonts would be used in English except a bit stronger.

Now that we’ve made that distinction, we can answer the question. The answer to your question “Why do these English words make their way into otherwise entirely Japanese productions?” is that English is fairly common in Japan, not just in anime/manga. This isn’t solely a phenomenon about anime/manga, nor am I convinced that it’s particularly common in anime and manga. For instance, you can probably spot several instances of English in this picture of advertising in Tokyo (I found 3, with another 2 cases of the Roman alphabet being used to write non-English words, and quite a few katakana loanwords as well):

So in summary, it’s because English is common in Japanese culture. But that’s not a very satisfying answer by itself. Rather than answering the broad question of why modern Japanese culture often uses English (which I think might be better posed at Japanese.SE with some modifications) I’ll address the particular cases you have mentioned, in part because a full answer to the former question is probably impossible and in part because it’s off-topic.

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Using English is very common in music, where whole lines may be written in (oftentimes broken) English. This is not solely a Japanese phenomenon, as Korean and Chinese pop artists also often use English (Indian pop artists do so very frequently as well, but English is a fairly common language in India). As far as I can tell, it isn’t particularly common in anime songs, though of course I don’t have any statistics to back that up.

Essentially, it’s done in music to sound cool, for the reasons I listed above. It also somewhat expands their audience, since people around the world speak English. I don’t know if there’s an analogy that would be familiar to people who only speak English, but the closest I could come up with is that Latin is occasionally used in English-language music.

In fact, English use in Japanese music predates J-Pop itself (which is the genre that most anime music falls in). Japanese rock musicians in the 1960s and '70s were mostly inspired by their western counterparts, most notably the Beatles. For a time, Japanese rock singers believed that the Japanese language was too restrictive to be able to sing rock-style, so most of them sung in English (see here). The first really successful band to sing in English was Happy End, but even after that, people continued using English at least occasionally. It’s possible to write long academic papers on the use of English in Japanese music, but I’ll stop here for brevity.

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For Digimon Tamers, and indeed many series, the title is displayed in English. In fact, most series now have both an English and a Japanese title, which do not always mean the same thing. In the case of Digimon, the word ‘Digimon’ comes from two English words, ‘Digital’ and ‘Monster’. Tamers is also an English word. The title could be written 「デジモンテイマーズ」, but it’s more authentic-looking to use the English title. As for why the title was chosen in English to begin with, again, this is best explained via the rule-of-cool, since English sounds different and interesting. Of course, not all shows do this, and it’s mostly a stylistic decision, so it’s probably impossible to give a better explanation.

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As for Eva, most computer systems, even in Japan, are based on English. Most programming languages are also based on English. As a result, it seems more authentic (or at least, it did at the time) to have computers and technology things entirely or mostly in English. I don’t know if this is changing, now that there are Japanese-language programming languages, operating systems, etc.

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As for “BEER”, it is not uncommon in Japan to advertise beer in English. This example is a fairly small company which I found from reading Moyashimon, but it’s certainly not uncommon for beer to be written in English. I don’t really know why. My suspicion is that this is because beer originated as a western drink.

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I could probably go on for a while, but I think this answer is already too long and there’s no point to continuing to list examples, so I’ll end it here. As I said above, this might make a good question on Japanese.SE if you phrase it appropriately. It could also make a good question on the proposed Japanese Culture site.

Source: anime.stackexchange.com/a/842/37067

Greetz,
Quuador