Google is an amazing tool that allows us to find information in seconds, and I swear by it. When searching in Japanese, however, Googling can be a bit more complicated. First of all, to find information on an individual in Japanese you obviously need to know the correct kanji for their name, and searching with the wrong characters will bring up unexpected results just as misspelling a name will mess up Google results in English. There are many different name kanji for writing Japanese names, and the most common names can be the hardest to work with since there are so many possible variations. If you wanted to find information on singer Ayumi Hamasaki, for example, you’d type the name in to the kanji front-end processor (IME on Windows, Kotoeri on the Mac) then hit the space bar, scrolling through the many possible kanji. Which one is it? Surprise — all of them are wrong. The singer writes her first name in hiragana.
Five common ways of writing the female Japanese name Ayumi in kanji.
And there she is!
