Doors and windows can’t keep them out; airport immigration officers can’t stop them and the Internet is an absolute reproduction soil. They seem harmless in small doses, but large imports threaten Japan’s very uniqueness, say critics. “They are foreign words and they are infecting the Japanese language” Sometimes I feel like I need a translator to understand my own language,” says Yoko Fujimura with little anger, a 60-year-old Tokyo restaurant worker. “Its becoming incomprehensible.” It’s not only Japan who is on the defensive. Countries around the globe are wet through their hands over the rapid spread of American English. Coca-Cola, for example, is one of the most recognized terms on Earth. It is made worse for Japan, however, by its unique writing system. The country writes all imported utterances - except Chinese - in a different script. called katakana（片假名）. It is the only country to maintain such a distinction. Katakana takes far more space to write than kanji - the core pictograph（象形文字）characters that the Japanese borrowed from China 1,500 years ago. Because it stands out, readers complain that sentences packed with foreign words start to resemble extended strings of lights. As if that weren’t enough, katakana terms tend to get confusing. For example, digital camera first appears as degitaru kamera. Then they became the more ear-pleasing digi kamey. But kamey is also the Japanese word for turtle. “It’s very frustrating not knowing what young people are talking about,” says humorously Minoru Shiratori, a 53-year-old bus driver. “Sometimes I can’t tell if they’re discussing cameras or turtles.”

   In a bid to stop the flood of katakana, the government has formed a Foreign Words Committee to find suitable Japanese replacements. The committee is slightly different from French-style. language police, which try to support a law that forbids advertising in English. Rather, committee members and traditionalists hope a sustained campaign of persuasion, gentle criticism and leadership by example can turn the tide.