Kirk here with news about how Solaseed Air is planning to help promote the cities of Kumamoto, Kikuchi, and Yamaga, the towns of Takamori and Mifune, and the village of Minamiaso via in-flight announcements and articles in their in-flight magazine. Sounds good. One thing I noticed, though, is the odd punctuation that has become pretty common in Japan, "Go! forward Kumamoto." I once wrote a letter to the editor of the Asahi Shimbun (published nationally; Japanese edition) that NHK's "Go for! Tokyo 2020" (Olympic slogan) was very odd as English because an exclamation mark functions as the end of a sentence and "Go for!" doesn't stand alone as an utterance. Before that, my university wanted to create a poster or something that said "We are! Kumagaku" — all in English (but, of course, for a Japanese audience). Fortunately, the higher ups listened to reason and came up with a better slogan.

In Japanese, I have no complaints about this relatively common pattern:

トビタテ！日本
がまだせ！熊本
目指せ！甲子園
がんばれ！阪神タイガース
頑張ろう！熊本
行こう！東北

The problem occurs when this Japanese sensibility regarding what an exclamation mark is and how it can be used is applied to English as NHK did with "Go for! Tokyo 2020." The more basic issue is whether punctuation is considered to be part of a language or separate from it. Of course, my view is that punctuation is part of English, so the application of this usage to English bothers me, in part because I suspect it compounds the confusion of young Japanese people who are studying English.