Why do Japanese games say "Now Loading" instead of "Loading"?


It is a convention for video games made in Japan, when loading data, to
display the legend

`NOW LOADING`

Whereas titles made overseas generally stick with the more succinct

`LOADING`

Is there any linguistic reason for the addition of the word "now"?




I doubt there is a good linguistic reason for this. Probably someone happened
to come up with "Now Loading", and other developers followed without thinking
much about it. This is not surprising at all. After all, Japanese people have
coined tons of [_wasei-eigo_](https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/wasei-eigo/)
terms and kept using them without thinking about them.

Another similar example is "Sorry, this site is Japanese only"; around 2000,
many Japanese people somehow believed this was a _polite_ and natural English
expression, and put this sentence at the header or footer of their websites.
No one knows who started using this, but it did spread like an infectious
disease.

