Names in Japanese are quite different from what we’re used to in the West. Right off the bat, the family and given names are reversed, so if you’re going to talk about “kawaii” virtual idol Miku Hatsune in Japanese, you’d need to get used to calling her Hatsune Miku. There are no middle names in Japan, and over the years I’ve been asked quite a lot by my students about my own middle name (Rowland), which they find interesting. Japanese also never name sons after fathers, as my own father did with me, and part of the mystique of the famous thief Lupin III is that he’s the third generation to hold that name despite being of mixed Japanese ancestry. It’s funny the way certain names push cultural buttons. When I was a teacher, my students would quote lines from the classic Heidi anime to me, since there’s a boy named Peter in the show, and anyone named Freddie or Jason would will probably have Japanese people associating them with horror movie villains for a few seconds. I have a friend named Brad who makes Japanese people nervous, since phonetically his name is the same as “blood.”
Part of Lupin III’s appeal is that his name is Western style.
