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Visiting a country in which English isn't the official language can be tricky.  Visiting one in which the Latin alphabet isn't common can be crazy.  But luckily for some travelers, Google's trying to sort out the matter on its maps of Japan.

Japan stands out as one of Google's preferred non-American places.  The company has established an office in Tokyo, for example, and featured parts of Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka in some of its first Street View coverage from overseas.  So the map language development is a rather natural step, and on the LatLong Blog, International Program Manager Linne Ha gave the details.

"This week we will be releasing English labels of city names, prefectures, districts and transit station names in Japan," she wrote.  "We have used a combination of transliteration (local pronunciation into English alphabet) and translation so that 'Shibuya Eki' would read as 'Shibuya Station', for example.  We thought it would be more helpful to transliterate the name but let users know the difference between a city or a station."

Ha then continued, "We've even used macrons so 'Tokyo' reads as 'Tōkyō' to help with pronunciation."

Odds are good that some goofs will occur, of course, and Google's not promising complete coverage.  Still, it's hard to complain about something like this, and it'll be interesting to see if Google Maps makes any other countries the focus of similar efforts.