Lost In Tokyo

Of Signage, Nameless Streets and the Kindness of Strangers

When I was growing up in Tokyo in the 1960s, all the signage was in Japanese—a combination of hiragana, katakana and kanji that was considered universally accessible, since even small children could read the hiragana. Unfortunately, many gaijin visitors and residents couldn’t, which resulted in their getting hopelessly lost in the city’s sprawling train…