Japan’s public broadcaster NHK is being sued for ’emotional distress’ because the national channels are using, he claims, too many ‘loanwords’ in its transmissions. He is suing NHK for 1.4 million Yen (about $14,000), and is arguing in his writ that NHK is making its broadcasts unintelligible.

Hoji Takahashi, age 71, cites words such as ‘trouble’, ‘risk’, ‘drive’ and ‘parking’ as borrowed words that are now used frequently by Japanese. Those words would be acceptable, but they are mangled by the Japanese language into ‘toraburu’ for trouble, and where the French word ‘concierge’ is pronounced as ‘konsheruju’, which can prove difficult for older Japanese not quite up to speed on the ‘new’ words.

He has formed an association for the protection of the Japanese language, and complains that NHK has not given him the courtesy of a reply to his complaints.

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