One of the cuter — or possibly creepier — things that Japanese girls do is refer to themselves in the third person, done by Fuko from Clannad After Story, Katyusha from Girls und Panzer and Misaka’s clone sisters from A Certain Scientific Railgun. Usually, Japanese girls will use their own names in place of a first-person pronoun at a young age, then when they start school and begin interacting with other girls will switch to atashi, a feminine version of watashi, the most common word for “I” in Japanese. (Some will opt for the slightly masculine-sounding boku, and the Japanese word for “tomboy” is bokukko or “girl who uses boku to refer to herself.”) My daughter is almost 17 and still refers to herself by her own name. When I asked her about this, she told me, “Well, I can’t go around calling myself atashi [I]. It would sound too grown-up, and it wouldn’t go with my personality at all.” It’s really amazing how the Japanese have been able to make a simple concept like “I” so incredibly complex.
