Written word

Japan is the land of the written word, with writings everywhere. Not only in trendy spots like Akihabara and such, but look at the outside of Kokura station:


Kokura, in Kyushu, is the first stop of the shinkansen from Honshu. It is not an actual city but an industrial centre and a port, part of Kita Kyushu. So not a big city and not a fashionable place, but it's still drown in advertisements. The video screen (centre) is also very loud.

As strange as it sounds, Japanese TV is not often only images and sounds. When the main characters of a movie first appear, their names (and the actor's) are superimposed. Any talk show will have the program name in one corner, some comment in another and usually the 'funny' lines written in huge characters at the bottom. So a quiz show will look like this:

This is the always bouncy Aki Hoshino.
Note that there is no channel logo: not enough space?

Of course TV commercials are drown in text too, with some special offers flashing at subliminal speed. But Japanese TV commercials are a huge subject in themselves, we'll come back to them later.

With written words ubiquitous in Japan, from streets to TV, from manga to adventure video games, is the literacy level higher than in other developed countries? No. The UN results for "Adults at high literacy level" does not show Japan in the first ten (1998 data, #1 Sweden, #2 Norway). Surely that does not mean that there is a saturation level for advertising messages? That would be bad news for marketing overpaid cranks.