Kanji are the Chinese characters which were imported into Japan around the 5th century A.D. Unlike the hiragana and katakana syllaberies, which only express sounds like ka, ki, ku, ke and ko, kanji have actual meanings attached to them. Fundamentally there are two ways to read any kanji character: the Japanese reading and the Chinese reading, with the former generally used for more elemental concepts like air, water, and house, with the latter for more more advanced concepts like atmosphere, water pressure, and residence. There’s another way to read any kanji, however, and that’s basically any way you like, thanks to something called ateji, which means “substitute pronunciation” (basically attaching an arbitrary reading for that character). Two good examples of this are the Japanese titles of A Certain Magical Index and A Certain Scientific Railgun, which defines “index” and “railgun” using kanji characters and force an English pronunciation for the words with overlaid katakana. In a recent episode of Chunibyo demo Koi ga Shitai (“Even People With Adolescent Delusions of Grandeur Want to Fall In Love”), Rikka makes kanji shirts that say “Evil Eye” and “Dark Flame,” using the ateji system to make kanji readable in English. J-List sells kanji name stamps that allow you to get your name in kanji, and ateji is one way to convert a Western name into kanji characters. For example, I have a friend who’s last name is Lockwood, and he uses the characters for “lock” and “wood” for his name stamp.
Forcing English readings on kanji characters is easy with ateji.
