kobausk on Youtube has posted a video of how to have the tool icons shown and localization enabled on Mac mini w/ OSX 10.9.5.
The solution in the video is to change the primary system language to English (set English to the top of the list in the Language & Region pane).
He also disabled OpenGL to get Krita to work.

https://youtu.be/bwmU5lFXyoQ
https://twitter.com/kobausks/status/580132456797356032

The funny thing here is that on Windows it's exactly the other way around -- Krita can only be set to Japanese on a Windows set to Japanese. I don't know why, this is some code deep inside KDE's platform adaptation.