Seven-Eleven stores in Japan to start selling English-labeled foods

Adding shop labels in English will help stores sell products- it's business sense.

Making Japan like the US?

Thats laughable ....

@nathan brown: seriously? The food is the same. The taste is the same. The packages will also have English... and this is an outrage?

7-11 is, after all, a “convenience” store. Let it be convenient. Much easier to have simple multilingual packaging than to have non-Japanese speaking customers asking non-English speaking questions about the contents of curious looking items.

only about 30yrs late , doesnt take much extra small print to add an English title

Very decent of them and I'm sure it will be appreciated by visitors.

Family mart and lawson at least in tokto have been doing it for 6 months already

I hope they use English instead of what they think is English. For example, most English speakers know what “sushi” is; very few want to eat “raw fish on rice soaked in vinegar.”

Saw this recently: seaweed soaked in soy sauce. Seaweed means different things to different countries. As does “soaked”. It’s konbu.

How will they differentiate between tuna mayo and maguro?

Cool....wish they did this 20 years ago when I could not read. Fortunately I can read now so do not make the dumb mistakes I did long ago. I remember I went to buy milk and brought home a large yogurt drink instead. I remember pouring some in my coffee and was bewildered.

Good they can do this as more and more people visit and live in Japan.

Doubt that adding English level outside the tourist areas will have an impact outside tourist areas.

How many tourists have no command of the English language nor have Romanisation in common.

pickled Japanese apricot

I had to look that one up. Borscht makes a good point. Umeboshi in romaji will probably be more helpful.

Going to the local store will be so much more fun now!

I for one have passed on buying onigiri simply because I didn't recognize the kanji and therefore wasn't able to discern what the filling was. If they all have the English translation, then I'd be more apt to buy them in the future. This has nothing to do with "Westernizing" Japan. And Japan will not lose its cultural identity because of it.

This is terrible, Japan is doing their best to make visiting Japan unappealing. They change their onsen symbol to a generic international one, change the taxis to copy London taxis and change their language to English.. why visit Japan at all if it's just like a western country? People visit Japan because it's Japanese, making Japan another America will hurt them in the end.