I have a friend named Josh, and I call him “Josh,” but if we were Japanese I’d probably have some silly nickname for him like Josuke, Jo-chin or Pokopen. An interesting facet of human relationships in Japan is the usage of nicknames, and in any close circle of friends it’s normal for everyone to have a unique name (called adana in Japanese) that comes to define the relationships in the group. My son’s been running with the same circle of friends for years, and each of them has one of these special nicknames — one boy accidentally misread “Georgia” (as in Georgia Coffee, Coca-Cola’s popular brand of canned coffee) as “Giro-gia,” and sure enough that became his nickname for all eternity. In the anime Hanasaku Iroha, nicknames people call each other by become a central theme as the main character Ohana grows closer to Minko and Nako (aka Minchi and Nakochi), who work with her at her grandmother’s inn.Do they do this in your country? At home my nickname is P-chan, a name I inherited from a cat we used to own, not the pig from Ranma 1/2.
Nicknames are an important part of relationships in Japan.
