It’s not parent. This article is either terribly written or horribly translated. The captions in the photos don’t match what said in the text and aren’t logically consistent across the article.

It is perfectly logically consistent.

Picture of Shibuya Station's glowing sign. Caption: "the famous Tokyo shopping district known worldwide as Shibuya will be changed in its official presentation from Sibuya"

Currently, Shibuya is officially supposed to be romanized as Sibuya, but in common usage including signage it is written Shibuya.

"Amid concern the divide between official rules and common usage is causing confusion, a subcommittee of the Council for Cultural Affairs deemed it necessary to consider the revision to improve communication."

Since they want to adapt the law to match what everyone is already doing anyways, no change is to be expected.

It may technically be logically consistent, but nobody writes this way: “meaning, for example, the official spelling of the central Japan prefecture of Aichi will replace Aiti.”

This reads that the official spelling is currently Aichi.

The Shibuya sentence is very awkward as well.

“Aichi will replace Aiti” seems pretty clear to me.

The article talks about how "y" is replacing "x" as the official romanization in Japan. "The official spelling of the central Japan prefecture of Aichi" indicates that "Aichi" is the official spelling. This means to me that "Aichi" is "y" and, by extension, that "Aiti" is "x".

"Aichi will replace Aiti" doesn't add any clarity if it's breaking that logic. There's a reason why others also find this article hard to parse.

Yes, Y replacing X reading is correct.

It's hard to parse because the Japanese system is itself a mess. The (former) official romanization rules say the name of this prefecture should be written Aiti but the official practice is to write it as Aichi because that's easier to teach to non-Japanese.

Consider that the romanization rules were (iirc) mostly originating from the ministry of education, but that ministries responsible for trade and tourism would naturally prefer to use whatever is easiest for foreign partners to deal with, and could lobby for exceptions since they're revenue centers rather than cost centers. Japan has both a professional bureaucracy under a parliamentary system and de facto one party rule, so (imho) there's much greater potential for policy balkanization of this sort.

People absolutely do write this way. My guess is that the article writer is from the UK rather than the US. British English often involves longer and more complex clauses and something not unlike operator overloading.

The use of "from" instead of "to" is confusing. I had to read those lines again after figuring out halfway the article what the actual direction was.

It's logically consistent, but clunky to read and prone to misunderstanding. I had to read over it a couple of times to understand, are they changing from Sibuya to Shibuya or the other way around?

As an example of text written by native English speakers that has these properties of being entirely logically consistent but clunky and difficult to understand, see the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Not knocking him, just clarifying. It is terribly written (The Japan Times is an English-language Japanese publication, you can safely knock them for it), but the (untranslated) chart tells the tale: Kunrei-shiki on the left and Hepburn-shiki on the right. What the article doesn't make clear is that Hepburn-shiki is what we're already used to seeing overseas, so for us, nothing is changing. Shibuya is still Shibuya, but the written Romanization is not the best pronunciation guide no matter what form of Romaji.

I completely misread the article too (and the 'Additional context' article posted here), I think because it words things strangely but also the whole message is about change and all the examples seem to be of places where the well known spelling is already the Hepburn spelling. So the change is to official spellings that aren't used?

>So the change is to official spellings that aren't used?

Yes, the whole point is that kunreishiki is not practically used so it doesn't make sense for it to continue to be the official way to romanize things and for it to continue to be taught in school when no one is using it.

Came here to say exactly this, the article is written maddeningly.

English readers will more naturally expect the "before" to come first in a sentence, and then the "after", but in the article the "before" consistently comes at the end of sentences.

The government officially used the Kunrei-shiki romanization rules for decades (apparently, though this is the first time I've ever heard of it), but is soon changing to using the Hepburn romanization rules [which correspond to nearly 100% of romanized Japanese terms that anybody would ever have seen in the wild].

The "diagram" in the article doesn't help English-speaking audiences at all, so it's out of place in this article. It seems to have been lifted directly from some other source, and what's more it's kind of a badly-designed diagram to begin with: the header reads something like "change in romanization system", each of the green background terms are names, and under it on the left is that name romanized under the old system and on the right is under the new system... but the names of the systems are in the first data row instead of in the header row / a second header row. Just.. so confusing.

I imagine they assume a reader knows what the Hepburn and Kunrei-siki are.

Kind of. The Japan Times is interesting. It's an English-language publication, but it is written for Japanese people by Japanese people. Despite their target audience being Japanese people, the fact that it is an English-language publication kind of makes it a default paper (well, figurative paper) of record for what's going on in Japan for people outside of Japan that don't really speak Japanese.

They also make textbooks for Japanese-language learners.

I don't know about that. If you look at the bylines more than half the writers come from anglophone countries, and a lot of the feature articles seem aimed at foreign settlers in Japan. They take breaking news from the Kyodo newswire and mostly do features.

My Japanese isn't good enough to read the news at speed, but I can manage TV news; there's a lot of stories that don't show up in the Japan Times until a week later. They do cover major political, economic, and crime (if it's a murder) news in a timely fashion.

It is possible my information about The Japan Times is basically historic and out of date at this point since organizations do change. This is the premise upon which the paper was originally founded and continued to operate on for most of its history, but I also don’t follow The Japan Times anymore.