Responce to the article by Tomoko Otake

After reading this article, I realized there were so many “gairaigo” in Japan, some of whose meaning I don’t understand. Somehow we, Japanese are attracted by things from other countries, especially western, say fashion, singers, models and languages, and want to use them and want to know about them more. Of course it isn’t particular only for Japan. It’s typical for lots of people to be attracted by other countries’ things. For example there are lots of people who are attracted by Japanese things and sometimes they wear shirts with kanji on. It’s kind of same situation as what the author is talking about in this article. However these tendency seems to be much more powerful in Japan. For example lots of young girls in Japan want to look like celebrities in other countries, lots of Japanese like western music or western movies and as this article said, lots of “gairaigo” are used in daily life or even official places. It’s because of, as the author said, Japanese people's long-standing sense of inferiority regarding all things Western.
The problem about this is that we use these words without knowing the meaning of the words and we use these words just to show off or not to miss the trend. It means we use these words without translating it into Japanese. If we will continue to use these kind of ways to use words, we won’t use “Japanese” itself and finally we may lose “Japanese”, our own language in the future.