Names in Japanese are quite different from what we’re usually used to in the West. Right off the bat, the family and given names are reversed, so if you’re going to talk about “kawaii” bikini idol Yuko Ogura in Japanese, you’d need to get used to calling her Ogura Yuko. There are no middle names in Japan, and over the years I’ve been asked quite a lot by my students about my own middle name (Rowland), which they find interesting. Japanese also never name sons after fathers, as my own father did with me, and part of the mystique of the famous thief Lupin III is that he’s the third generation to hold that name despite being of mixed Japanese ancestry. In the States, expectant mothers will buy a book of baby names that contains information on the etymology of each (for example, my own name comes from the Greek word for ‘rock’), and books which present various kanji names are popular in Japan, too. It’s common for Japanese to consult their local Shinto shrine for advice when choosing a name, but my wife’s family is a little more Buddhist than most, so we visited our family Buddhist temple instead. We had been all set to name our son Kazuma, written with the characters for “peace” and “horse,” but the priest warned us that choosing animal names was a bad idea, as our son would be headstrong and never listen to us.
It can be fun to study how Japanese surnames work. One of the mysteries of family names in Japan is the large number of different ones that exist, around 120,000, compared with a few thousand in China and only 249 in Korea. This is caused partially by how late Japan was in adopting universal surnames, which only became required in 1870, and a lack of a specific tradition of naming families up to that point. It’d be hard to imagine a neighborhood in the States where everyone was named Smith, but nearly everyone who lives around our house has the same last name as us, Yanai, and nearby there are patches of houses where everyone is named Hosoi or Ishida, yet no one is related to anyone around them. Part of this is due to the fact that we live in a small rural city in the exact center of the country where no one ever sells their land, because if you sold your land and moved to another part of the country, what would you do with your family gravestone? Your ancestors would be so lonely. One amusing aspect of living in Japan is hearing people with names like Tanaka (“in the rice field”), Yamada (“rice field on the mountain”) and Nakamura (“in the village”) argue vehemently that their ancesors were samurai warriors despite their agrarian sounding names.
It’s funny how different inputs — such as a simple song — can push different emotional buttons depending on what culture you hail from. When most North Americans hear the Scottish folksong Auld Lang Syne we probably immediately think of New Year’s Eve, of saying goodbye to the old year with a large beer in our hands. Hotaru no Hikari, or Light of the Fireflies, is the title of the Japanese version of this song, and in Japan it’s sung at graduations. The chorus tells the story of hard-working students who wanted to study so much that they read books by the light of fireflies captured in a jar, or the moonlight reflected off snow. It can bring a tear to the eyes of Japanese who hear it sung, and a totally different image from one we might conjure up. Incidentally, the song is also played by stores as they’re about to close, and if you’ve ever visited Japan and wondered why they were playing Auld Lang Syne over the store speakers, it was a polite request that you complete your purchase and leave the store.
