We've discussed recently the pervasive creep of loan words in Japanese with the example of "inbound" being used as a noun. Kumanichi reports polling results on their usage in local government documents, noting that 83.5% of residents have trouble understanding such terms.

Some terms have clear Japanese translations, such as "redundancy," while others, such as "cloud computing," do not. In the former case, they're often followed with a parenthesized kanji term, leading one to wonder why the katakana was used to begin with. The article also notes that borrowed terms can carry different nuances depending on locale, and that, while many prefectures have guidelines regarding their usage, Kumamoto does not. The article also includes a rather amusing list of such commonly-used terms. - William