You've probably heard that Japanese people are shy to speak English because they are afraid of making mistakes. Every night before I go to bed, I pray that this English language phobia will spill over into English writing. As one visitor to Japan said to me, "You could spend your life correcting all the poor English on signs and menus in this country."
Why is it that the Japanese, who are so shy to speak even good English, are so bold to abuse the written language? Especially when it comes to using permanent mediums such as signboards that broadcast errors to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. On signs and menus, no one seems to care if things are misspelled or incomprehensible. That's your problem!
With an alphabet of just 26 letters (compared to 45 for hiragana and katakana), I suppose English writing seems deceptively simple. But even with just 26 variables, there are millions of possibilities of making spelling mistakes. In fact, there are far more possible wrong combinations of letters than right ones. Yet, I don't think the Japanese even consider they may make errors when writing. As long as they are not speaking, they cannot be mistaking.