More Japanese Name Weirdness
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.
Some interesting names in Japanese: Morning Musume, Hiro (star) Tsunoda and Toys "R" Us
posted by Peter in Japan at 7:51 PM
6 Comments:
I was a bit surprised about the fact that there us such a big deal about "all caps names" when I first found out, but apparently it is pretty common. A few examples are X JAPAN, YOSHIKI, KREVA, SUGIZO...the japanese hip hop scene seems to be particularly "obsessed" with that topic if you look at the artist's names.
2:12 AM
Interesting. Yes, it's funny. A lot of Japanese will write their last name in all caps, as if there's some rule that says you must do this. TAKANA, Keiko.
2:14 AM
You mean モーニング right?
How about all lowercase, like e.e.cummings? Or one of my very old ones, .t.j.terru.
8:33 AM
"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"
And funnily enough in the last decade in the west the old belief of numerology has led to a fad of changing ones name to make it more auspicious. AFAIK most 'modern' systems steal heavily from kabbalah though ancient greeks like Pythagoras also dabbled in numerology. Most well known example in my part of the world is former WBA, IBO, WBO, IBC and WBU bantam weight worldchampion Johnny Bredahl Johansen who changed his name to Johnny Wahid Johansen after consulting with a numerologist (and no, he has not converted to islam, so the middle-eastern middle name is just strange). It didn't really do much for his career, he had allready peaked... didn't die of it though.
10:26 AM
Haha, I've been meaning to write a post on a similar topic for a long while now. Guess you beat me to it!
One of the most confusing examples I think is HYDE's use of all caps for his name in reference to his solo and collaborative work, but "hyde" in all lowercase when used in reference to his membership to L'Arc~en~Ciel.
11:25 AM
Yes, it's frustrating. To this day I hate typing Fate/stay night, or the fashion magazine egg. I'm an English major, damn it, not a doctor!
3:22 PM
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