Codes of the Street

Street Signs, Shinjuku

Moving to any foreign country is quite the challenge; learning the new systems, new regulations, norms of behaviour, setting up a life, a house, understanding the transport system, buying food, being able to communicate. Moving to Japan seems an extreme version of setting up a new life. Simply being on the street, sensing and walking the city is quite a challenge. In Tokyo, the vast majority of signs are in Japanese. Most of the time the linguistic landscape is taken for granted (Cenoz and Gorter, 2006). Yet it becomes so integral to make sense of the city; to understand historical sites, prohibited behaviours, directions and every day norms. 

As such, experiencing space in Tokyo can be disorienting. Most streets don’t have names or a logical chronological ordering. There is no street grid system. There are varying scales with tiny streets and towering elevated highways that ‘slice through the city, casting major avenues in shadow and blocking views’ (Pearson, 2007: 121). Life is not just experienced at the street level but a large portion of life is spent underground commuting and in subterranean malls. When you look up, restaurants and bars stack upon each other creating infinite options of consumption. However, because they are stripped of an immediacy of the street it makes them less comfortable to enter. The extent to which this feeling will change through language acquisition and feeling more comfortable with my surroundings will be interesting to measure.

References 

Cenoz and Gorter (2006) Linguistic Landscape and Minority Languages, The International Journal of Multilingualism, 3, 67-80.

Pearson, C. A (2007) Reinventing Tokyo? Architectural Record, 195, 11, 121.