I wrote recently about how Japanese names are (usually) written in kanji, and how there are many possible ways of writing a particular name, just as many Western names have various alternate spellings. One of the challenges when making a new business contact in Japan is learning the person’s name characters properly, which is one of the reasons for meishi or “name cards,” what business cards are called here. It’s extremely rude to write someone’s name using the wrong characters, and when it comes time for J-List to send the customary mid-year gifts to the various companies we do business with (distributors, the makers of the anime dating-sim games we publish, and so on), we check carefully to make sure every gift is properly addressed using the correct name. An interesting facet of names being written with unique kanji characters is that when you perform a search using Google or Yahoo in Japanese, you need to already know the correct kanji if you want to get any results. Since this isn’t always possible, Japanese net users will often do a search using hiragana or romaji (the Roman alphabet), which generally brings up the Wikipedia page for the person in question, containing the correct characters so that a second search be made. The Japanese government maintains a list of officially approved “name kanji” to keep people from naming their children with improper or archaic characters that aren’t used anymore, although parents sometimes take issue with the government telling them what names they can or can’t use for their children.
