From Japan Today; May 30, 2018
TOKYO – “I often see foreign tourists with bewildered expressions while standing in front of railway network maps inside train stations. With just a little over two years until the Olympic Games, are the information services for foreigners in Tokyo, which is supposed to be an international city, sufficient? To answer, I tried putting myself in the shoes of a foreign visitor who could not understand Japanese and tried to read a railway system map at a train station.”
So begins Kazuma Yamane in his “Nihon no Genki” column in the Yukan Fuji (May 27). His starting point was a sign inside Tokyo Station showing East Japan Railways’ local lines (kinko rosen-zu). The sign indicates station names in Japanese with their eiji (English character) equivalents.
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