UNIT 5

1	Many Japanese people have fond memories of graduation trips to Kyoto, the ancient capital famous for its cultural traditions and historic sites.  No city is seen as being more Japanese than Kyoto.  Yet Kyoto has a great number of overseas visitors and non-Japanese residents.  This is an increasingly common Kyoto sight: foreign tourists poring over guidebooks in front of Kyoto Station, wondering where they want to visit first and which method of transportation to take.  Other non-Japanese people take photos of their friends and loved ones.  Yes, Kyoto is increasingly becoming an international city.
2	Not too long ago, the Japanese government announced a policy to boost the countryfs tourist industry and to make Japan a etourism nation.f  The project comprises a variety of measures that aim to increase domestic and international tourism, both inbound and outbound.  As a first step, the government established the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) on October 1, 2008.  The JTA is developing various tourism-related initiatives with the goal of attracting ten million international visitors annually to Japan.  One such initiative, the Visit Japan Campaign, publicizes Japanfs tourist attractions abroad.
3	Another important initiative is to put up multilingual signs around the country.  In Kyoto, many signs already give information and directions in four languages \\ Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.  These four languages are becoming standard languages for people working in the tourist industry.  The official website of the JTA itself appears in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.
4	Most signs at railway stations are written in these four languages.  These multilingual signs can now be found not only in Kyoto but also in Tokyo, Osaka, and other big cities.   In some cases, simple pictures, or pictograms, are added to help those who donft understand any of the four languages to find elevators, restrooms, exits, and so on.  Pictograms can be said to be a truly universal language. 
5	While traveling, we sometimes need more cash, and the ATM is the most convenient way to get money.  However, overseas visitors often find the Japanese banking system old-fashioned and frustrating, with shorter banking hours than they are used to, more time-consuming procedures, and, in particular, fewer easily accessible ATMs.  In the past, having at last found an ATM, a tourist would be exasperated to find that most of the directions were in Japanese.  This particular annoyance has been decreasing as the importance of the tourist dollar becomes more widely recognized.
6	Is Japan really prepared for this huge number of foreign visitors?  Will Japanese people be able to communicate with them in their own languages?  Encounters with non-Japanese people can now occur anytime, anywhere, in all sorts of unexpected places, from the remotest countryside and the highest mountaintop to the most crowded subway platform.  In other words, people need to prepare themselves for any possibility imaginable.