The Westernisation of Japanese lettering

Abstract

The Japanese language, as a combination of three different scripts: Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji, is said to be one of the most complex writing systems. However, thanks to globalisation, the Latin lettering also joined this set. Unfortunately, parallel usage of different origins’ lettering created a lot of difficulties and challenges, which people had to and still have to face. The problem is obvious for people in Asia, with the solutions not always being so clear. When it comes to European designers who need to work in this kind of environment, it is really hard for them to find any kind of information regarding this topic. In this work, I will describe the design problems and solutions concerning the adaptation of Latin characters by Japanese fonts and rules of how they should work together as one font, as well as changes that occurred in this n lettering due to Westernisation. What is also worth mentioning and will be included in this paper are the descriptions of different kinds of adaptation of Latin characters by Japanese, such as: parallel usage of Latin and Japanese type to create an impression of coherence between the scripts, embodiment of one script into the other, or replacement of one script by the other to convey one message or an idea through the mixed design. The general idea behind this dissertation is to explore different approaches to solving problems existing in Japanese typography. Through this analysis, I hope to help achieve better understanding of how the typographical design should work in a multilingual environment.