Julian In Japanese Letters

Julian In Japanese Letters – Take a look at any clothing store and you’ll likely find at least one shirt covered in characters using the Japanese writing system. If you can actually read Japanese, you’ve probably noticed that what’s written is often gibberish. Interestingly, the opposite is also popular in Japan, where you can find a lot of t-shirts with random English words on them. So how did it all start and why does no one bother to check the meanings?

As far as we know, the first Western company to start putting Japanese symbols on clothes is the Superdry brand owned by SuperGroup plc. Although SuperGroup plc was founded in 1985, the Superdry brand that would make these Japanese-style shirts famous wouldn’t exist until 2003, with the first official store opening a year later in 2004.

Julian In Japanese Letters

According to the company’s website, the brand was born out of a creative collaboration in Cheltenham between entrepreneurs Julian Dunkerton and James Holder, who previously owned a successful clothing brand, trading under the name Cult Clothing, to quote. Holder, on the other hand, similarly founded a clothing company called Bench and had a strong background in graphic design.

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According to an interview with Holder, one of his main interests is typography, and one of the things he tried to do with the Bench brand was to use it in tandem with “high-impact imagery” to create striking designs for his shirts. As for Dunkerton, his main inspiration was vintage Americana. When the two men met, they believed they could combine these two elements to create a unique outfit that incorporated their love of custom clothing popular in Britain at the time.

But where do the random Japanese characters come from? According to Holder, he has always been a fan of Japanese culture, especially the clash of English characters alongside Japanese animation and artwork. In his own words:

I think I was very much a comic book geek when I was younger. I was a big fan of the 2000s and I went into that kind of comics and that kind of manga and it kind of collided with the two. You’d use a beautiful, chunky, bold typography like Helvetica or Avant Garde… and then collide that with the high-impact dynamics of manga graphics; It’s something you can see in neon lights on the streets of Tokyo, all running all the way through the packaging. So he took the big, bold, classic fonts and just went into this Japanese-influenced electric speaker, and it worked really well.

Holder’s love for this particular type of design crystallized when he visited Tokyo and admired the Japanese kanji imagery used alongside English typography in advertisements and clothing.

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As for the resulting product, Holder says the first shirt he designed for Superdry was the now-famous Osaka 6 shirt – a design that went through 5 iterations before Holder got it right. to him, “combined Jules’ love of Americana with my love of Japanese-style graphics and custom fit”. The shirt became one of the most iconic ever designed, famously worn by soccer star David Beckham, helping the fledgling brand to high street glory.

The shirts later released by Superdry incorporated random Japanese elements chosen by Holder almost entirely for their aesthetic value. In fact, according to a Japanese TV show interview with the company, no one working at the UK-based company speaks Japanese, and all the Japanese writing on their shirts was created by entering random English words into a basic English-to-Japanese translation program. Because of this, much of what appears on the t-shirts comes across as random gibberish to native Japanese speakers. In fact, the company even has an example of this in its logo, a stylized Japanese text above the Superdry name that translates to “MAXIMUM DRY (DO IT!)” in Japanese. This is because the company name is simply translated literally from English to Japanese without considering the subtle nuances and differences between the two languages.

As with most things that are popular, the brand’s success inevitably led to imitators. These imitators replicated the look of Superdry’s clothing endlessly, leading to a flood of cheap knockoffs sporting random Japanese symbols on them.

As you might expect, the fact that Superdry was considered a high-end brand, famous for being expensive, and worn by fashionable celebrities of the time such as David Beckham and Leonardo DiCaprio, only increased plebeian demand for cheaper alternatives. could pay.

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As we mentioned earlier, Holder was inspired to put random Japanese characters on his company’s shirts after seeing Japanese shirts with random English words on them. So how did it start?

Unfortunately, the origins of this reverse are somewhat difficult to trace, although it appears to have begun shortly after World War II. Although the United States and Japan were bitter enemies during the war, there was a massive export of American media to the country afterwards, which led to a love affair with American culture that continues, at least to some extent, to this day. Interesting Japanese traditions like celebrating Christmas dinner with KFC and statues of Colonel Sanders traditionally dressed as Santa for Christmas.

Back to T-shirts, just like how some English speakers fell in love with Japanese, some of the Japanese population fell in love with the look of English, often using it in advertising and clothing. As with Superdry, according to an interview with graphic designers working at Dentsu, one of Japan’s largest advertising firms, they choose English words almost entirely based on their “decorative function” rather than meaning.

Similar to how Holder emphasizes the bold, impressive aesthetic of Japanese characters, Japanese graphic designers have noted that English typography looks “cleaner” and less “noisy” than their own language, and as a result, brands are popular for stylizing their names. English. As strange as it may seem for a company or brand to design its logo in a language that is not native to its country, as long as the name is visually distinctive enough, it can stand out quite well as a logo.

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If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed) Also: If you’re learning Japanese, here’s one of the first things you should learn. How to introduce yourself! You can’t do that if you don’t know your name in Japanese, right? Here’s how to write your name in Japanese!

The Japanese language actually has 3 alphabets – Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Japanese names are written in Kanji, and foreign names are written in Katakana. Foreign names are usually written in katakana to make them phonetically consistent with Japanese. Andrew becomes

One benefit of writing foreign names in katakana is that the reading and pronunciation are clear to Japanese people, and people automatically know it’s a foreign name just by looking at it. If you have a fairly common name, then there is a standard way to write your name in katakana that the Japanese are already familiar with.

The easiest way to write your name in Japanese is to find the Katakana letter that matches the pronunciation of your Japanese name.

Phonetic Alphabet Word Search

For example, if your name is “Maria,” search for the Katakana character マ for Ma, then the character Ri for リ, and then the character A for ア. You just need to put them together and write マリア for “Maria”.

). In Katakana, long vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) are represented by hyphens. Danny is spelled ダニー and Nicole is spelled ニコール.

Also, remember that the L sounds are changed to R to match the sounds of the Japanese alphabet. So it becomes Lauren

Here is a list of common foreign names written in Japanese katakana. Looking at these will help you understand how your name should be pronounced in Japanese too!

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When writing first and last names together in Japanese, the names must be separated with this character: ・

And that’s it! You now have all the tools you need to say and write your name in Japanese. Don’t forget to introduce yourself to the new friends you meet while visiting Japan!

Hello, my name is Kazue. My passion is teaching Japanese (more than 10 years of experience) and introducing an interesting part of Japan. Please enjoy this Blog 🙂 If you are new to learning Japanese, please check out my Free 7 Day Japanese Course! Size of this preview: 500 × 600 pixels. Other dimensions: 200 × 240 pixels | 400 × 480 pixels | 640 × 768 pixels | 853 × 1,024 pixels | 1,500 × 1,800 pixels.

Note: Lowercase フ (HU), ホ (HO), ヰ (WI), and ム (MU) are not used in today’s Japanese orthography and therefore are not included in the Unicode character set or other regular characters.

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