During our beer tasting sessions on the first couple of nights in Japan we noticed that some of the cans sold in the local shop had braille embossed into their tops. This led to some speculation on how braille in Japanese works, speculation which is of course entirely sated by Wikipedias article on Japanese Braille. It works much as you’d expect: each distinct set of dots represents one of the characters in the Japanese syllabary. There’s even a handy chart to translate between the two.
So that only leaves me to translate the pair of photos I took of braille on the tops of beer cans. I can happily inform you that this can says “osake” (alcohol) on it, and the other can says on one side “osake” and on the other side “Kirin”, the brand of beer that was inside. Unfortunately, none of the braille offered the blind Japanese reader any notice that the beer inside tasted like machine oil.
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