Since the beginning of the current century, Japan has seen a dramatic increase of foreign population and various social problems have emerged in society. To deal with the large population from abroad, not only the local authorities, but many non-government organizations get involved in relevant activities. To provide a general picture of multilingual life in a traditional homogeneous society,this study attempts to analyze the language use in today’s Japan with Tokyo as a reference point. As a cosmopolitan city, the linguistic landscape under the control of municipality of Tokyo faces the question of how to address the needs of its large number of foreign residents. My investigation into the research literature and the offi cial documents shows that while the relevant authorities are fully aware of their responsibilities to provide service including more languages in the official linguistic landscape, particularly the languages of ethnic minorities, they can hardly fulfi ll their objectives of creating equal environment for different ethnic groups in terms of language service due to financial constraints. The article concludes that if the current situation continues, the problem is bound to result in negative impact on both municipality administration and academic research.