Slashdot Mirror
Japan Pins Tourism Hopes on PDA
Sammy at Palm Addict writes "According to Australia News.com, Japan will start lending PDA's to foreign visitors to help tourists get to grips with the country. The aim is to make Japan more attractive to foreign tourists, who are often put off by the country's language barrier. The PDA's will be loaded with travel information and translation services as part of a tourism promotion scheme. "Japan's tourism authority will lend the PDAs containing Chinese, Korean and English software, to selected tourists who land at Narita Airport near Tokyo from February through March to test the response" Japan's transport ministry said."
Why does it have to be a PDA? I mean a magazine or pamphlet would seemingly be just as useful to most people (and much cheaper). Put some common translations that tourists might need in a little book, and throw in a good map and some sightseeing information, and you're all set. Now granted, the magazine will not have GPS capability or be able to talk to me or whatever...but still it is only
On another note, PDA's are still pretty touchy most times. They do lock up occasionally, and someone who has never used it could get confused. The batteries die, the screens get scratched up, the stylus gets lost...all of which make it inconvenient to loan out to someone visiting the country.
having traveled in Japan, I've found the double sided maps adequate for getting around. They are printed with Japanese on one side and another language, say English on the other. It's a simple matter of pattern recognition to get around and after a while one learns to read the Japanese signs at the transport stops. The PDA will make this a little easier, but a paper map is much more robust. A phrase book is also very helpful and incorporation into the PDA will be handy.
Tourist areas all over the world manage this without PDAs.
And when you don't want to be confined to the tourist traps?
English is widespread, but not _that_ widespread. Many visitors to Japan aren't Westerners, but Chinese or Korean. That second language should probably be Mandarin, which likely wouldn't help most slashdotters much. A restaurant not close to the usual tourist haunts may get foreign customers a few times a year at most; that would be a lot of work keeping the menus up to date in three languages just for those few occasions.
And since English knowledge in general is not up to the standard where you are confident to write a legible menu, who is going to do that translation work to begin with?
I think this is a pretty good idea. It may give visitors the confidence needed to go off the beaten tourist path a bit and try some really different experiences. There's a lot more to Japan than temples and expensive fish restaurants.
Also note that while they'll be passing them out freely during the pilot, nothing precludes the use of a deposit system, or even rental, if the trials pan out.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Judging from just the comments so far, I fear this amount of misinformation this thread is going to pickup about Japan. Perhaps the PDA can just have a nice little FAQ for the uninformed who somehow or another managed to wind up in Tokyo. (Because they thought it would be neat.) Or the simple things, like "proper business card manners" for the businessmen.
So far in this thread I've seen all the typical: misleading posts about Japan hating foreigners, misleading posts about Japanese loving foreigners, uninformed posts about the language, complete and utter guesswork abound... etc. Japan seems to be a really popular place for folks with a few thousand bucks and too much time on their hands to head off to these days, head full of myths and a complete unwillingness to deal with anything not of their own culture... then come back and proclaim to all they meet what they "learned".
I figure it's only a matter of time before someone posts the myth that immersion (as an adult) instantly and automagically equals the best way to learn the complex language and writing that even the Japanese spend much of their schooling learning. In short, best of luck... you could actually study the language, culture, and actually try to make a good impression, but I suppose that was never really the point.