Japanese name: Encyclopedia II - Japanese name - Characters

Japanese name - Characters

Japanese names are usually written in kanji (Chinese characters), although some names use hiragana or even katakana, or a mixture of kanji and kana. While most "traditional" names use kun'yomi (native Japanese) kanji readings, a large number of given names and surnames use on'yomi (Chinese-based) kanji readings as well. Many others use readings which are only used in names (nanori), such as the female name Nozomi (希). The vast majority of surnames comprise one or two kanji. Some others consist of three characters. Examples are Sasaki (佐々木, among the most popular surnames), Hon'inbō (本因坊, a name for the famous family of go players), Shōji (東海林), Gushiken (具志堅), Yosano (与謝野) and Kindaichi (金田一). There are also a number of surnames consisting of four kanji, but they are relatively rare.

Female given names often end in the syllable ko, written with the kanji meaning "child" (子). This was much more common up to about the 1980s, but the practice does continue today. Male names occasionally end with the syllable ko, but very rarely using the kanji 子 (Most often, if a male name ends in ko, it ends in hiko, using the kanji 彦). Common male name endings are -shi and -o; names ending with -shi are often verbs, e.g., Atsushi which might mean, for example, "to be faithful." In the past (before World War II), names written with katakana were common for women, but this trend seems to have lost favour. Hiragana names for women are not unusual. Kana names for boys, particularly those written in hiragana, have historically been very rare. This may be in part because the hiragana script is seen as feminine; in medieval Japan, women generally did not learn kanji and wrote exclusively in hiragana.

Names, like other Japanese words, cannot begin with the syllable n (ん, ン). A final ending n is not rare, the male names Ken, Kon, Shin, Jun, and Den are examples.

One large category of family names can be categorized as "-tō" names. The kanji 藤, meaning wisteria, has the on'yomi tō (or, with rendaku, dō). Many Japanese people have surnames that include this kanji as the second character. This is because the Fujiwara clan（藤原家）gave their samurai surnames ending with the first character of their name, to denote their status in an era when commoners were not allowed surnames. Examples include Atō, Andō, Itō (although a different final kanji is also common), Udō, Etō, Endō, Gotō, Katō, Kitō, Kudō, Kondō, Saitō, Satō, Shindō, Sudō, Naitō, Bitō, and Mutō. As already noted, some of the most common family names are in this list.

Japanese name - Difficulty of reading names

A name written in kanji may have more than one common pronunciation, only one of which is correct for a given individual. For example, the surname written in kanji as 中田 may be read either Nakata or Nakada. Conversely, any one name may have several possible written forms, and again, only one will be correct for a given individual. The character 一 when used as a male given name may be used as the written form for "Hajime," "Ichi," "Kazu," "Hitoshi," and many others. The name "Hajime" can also be written as 始, 治, 初, and in several other ways. This many-to-many correspondence between names and the ways they are written is much more common with male given names than with surnames or female given names, but can be observed in all these categories. This can make the collation, pronunciation, and romanization of a Japanese name a very difficult problem. For this reason, business cards often include the pronunciation of the name as furigana, and forms and documents always have spaces to write the reading of the name in kana (usually katakana). At restaurants in Japan it is common to wait to be seated by writing one's name on a list and waiting to be called, and at the top of the list there is usually a request to write one's name in katakana, rather than kanji.

A few Japanese names, particularly family names, include old-fashioned versions of characters. For example the character shima, island, may be written as 嶋 instead of the more common form, 島. Some names also feature very uncommon kanji. Japanese people who have such a name are unlikely to compromise by substituting similar characters.

An example of such a name is Saitō. While there are over 100 kanji that can be read as sai and over 200 kanji for tō, in this case, there are two common kanji for sai. The two sai characters have different meanings. Sai (斉, Sai^?) means "together" or "parallel" but sai (斎, sai^?) means "to purify". Confusing the two characters would be an embarrassing mistake.

Family names are sometimes written with idiosyncratic characters, called ateji, that relate indirectly to the name as spoken. For example, 四月一日 would normally be read as shigatsu tsuitachi ("April 1st"), but as a family name it is read watanuki ("unpadded clothes"), because April 1st is the traditional date to switch from winter to summer clothes.

Japanese name - Regulations

Kanji names in Japan are governed by the government's rules on kanji use. There are currently (Oct 2004) 2,232 "name kanji" (the jinmeiyō kanji 人名用漢字) used in personal names, and the government plans to increase this list by 578 kanji in the near future. This would be the largest increase since World War II. Only kanji which appear on the official list may be used in given names. This is to ensure that names can be written and read by those literate in Japanese. Rules also govern names considered to be inappropriate; for example, in 1993 two parents who tried to name their child Akuma (devil) were prohibited from doing so.

Japanese government regulations currently restrict the number of kanji that can be used in naming infants to 2,230, but many old characters are still intact in adults' names. Because these restrictions have been confusing to say the least, many recent changes have been made to increase rather than to decrease the number of kanji allowed for use in names. Moreover, the Sapporo High Court held that it was unlawful for the government to deny registration of a child's name because it contained a kanji character that was relatively common but not included in the official list of name characters compiled by the Ministry of Justice. Subsequently, the Japanese government promulgated plans to increase the number of "permitted" kanji.

The plan to increase the number of name kanji has been controversial, largely because Chinese characters meaning "cancer", "hemorrhoids", "corpse", and "excrement", as well as those used in jukugo (words which are compounds of two or more kanji) meaning "curse", "prostitute", and "rape", are among the proposed additions to the list. This is because no measures were taken to determine the appropriateness of the kanji proposed. However, the government will seek input from the public before approving the list.

Most Japanese people and agencies have adopted customs to deal with these issues. Address books, for instance, often contain furigana or ruby characters to clarify the pronunciation of the name. Japanese nationals are also required to give a romanized name for their passport. The recent use of Japanese media using katakana when referring to Japanese celebrities who have gained international fame has started a fad among young socialites attempting to invoke a cosmopolitan flair who use katakana names as a badge of honor.

All of these complications are also found in Japanese place names.

Not all names are complicated. Some common names are summarized by the phrase tanakamura ("the village in the midst of the fields"): the three kanjis: 田 (ta, rice field), 中 (naka, middle) and 村 (mura, village), together in any pair, form a simple, reasonably common surname: Tanaka, Nakamura, Murata, Nakata, Muranaka, Tamura.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Characters", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki