Sometimes names in Japan work in ways that are puzzling to Westerners. At a recent concert celebrating the 10th year of his career as a popular singer, anime otaku and all-around handsome guy, Gackt officially changed his professional name to…GACKT, using capital letters. “To commemorate this day, I’ve decided to go from using unassuming lower-case letters to giant, in-your-face capital letters!” In a similarly odd fashion, singer Hiro Tsunoda always uses a Lucky Star-style star character between his first and last name, which can be typed using Japanese fonts but not properly in English. When Japanese singer Minako Honda altered her stage name to include a small circle at the end, similar to pop group Morning Musume, my wife got a premonition that something bad would happen as it’s supposedly not a good idea to try to alter your own destiny by changing your name; sure enough, the singer died a few months later. Another quirky name in Japan is Toys “R” Us, which is written in katakana except for the ‘ra’ character in hiragana, corresponding to the backwards “R” in the company’s English name.
