Engrish

Japanese Engrish is somehow special. Basically there are two popular styles. The more widespread style is the design-style: Engrish words are used as design elements for shop windows, advertisements, t-shirts, etc. It is particularly popular to chose words with several meanings, and concatenate them in very creative ways. The second style is the babelfish-style. This style is only popular in areas with tourists such as Tokyo. It is used to translate important signs and to entertain tourists.

In addition, to make things even more interesting, sometimes the words are first translated into Japanese katakana, and then back to the Roman alphabet. (There is no "L" in Katakana.)

Angela pointed me to www.engrish.com. I think I should start taking more pictures too :-)