Choosing a Japanese name

I received a mail a few weeks ago saying they read all the posts about names, but they still wanted to know a little more detail. This person had the following questions:

1. Considering [one's new Japanese] name, [you] could go a couple routes. Should [one]:
   1. Katakana-ize it
   2. Kanji-ize it
   3. or choose a Japanese name that has a similar sound to it (maybe something like 城之内 {JŌNOUCHI})
2. Do you recommend going a certain way over others?
3. Do people back in the States still call you by your birth name?
4. Similarly, for those who knew you in Japan before you naturalised, have they adopted to calling you by your Japanese name?
5. How have your parents reacted?
6. Has it affected you in any particular way?

Regarding question #1, I chose 【ⅰ】 for my given name, and 【none of the above】 for my family name.

For most of my life I had a family name whose pronunciation was not deducible from its spelling even in America. When I came to Japan, it just got worse because of the amount of non-Japanese sounds in it (the "v" and "l" consonants, and the soft "i" and open "u" vowels (IPA: /hʌvɪl/) — 80% of my name had sounds in it that don't exist in Japanese. Whenever I gave my name to people in America, I'd have to provide them with a hint as to how to pronounce it ("rhymes with 'Cadillac Seville'"). To complicate matters, our family members in England pronounced our same name differently — providing further evidence to them that we yankees can't speak properly.

This heavily influenced my decision making for my new Japanese name: for the first time in my life, I could have a name that people could pronounce and remember and say with confidence, and would be common. It is for this reason that I ruled out using 当て字 {ateji} for my first name. I knew that if I choose to arbitrarily assign 漢字 {kanji} to my foreign name, it may look cool and/or exotic, but it would also mean I'd spend a lifetime explaining to people how to read & pronounce it.

My original name, "Adrian", caused people to do their their best impression of Sylvester Stallone during the final scene of Rocky. This is a joke that crosses multiple cultures, apparently. I've had Japanese and Americans do it to me. I couldn't enjoy that Academy Award winning movie for years because of that. In the U.S. in the seventies, Adrian was an uncommon for men. This isn't the case anymore in the 21st century or in the 20th century in Britain, but as a primary elementary school kid, I endured a fair amount of (mostly harmless) teasing, like any other kid with a "funny" name. Children are cruel.

That could explain why I chose カタカナ {katakana} over ひらがな {hiragana} — the former looks a tad more effeminate and soft, and well, I am a ♂ Adrian. ☺

I'm obviously not a traditional guy — I believe "The name doesn't make the man, but the man makes the name". I also thought it would be cruel and unusual punishment to ask my wife to take a name that she herself couldn't pronounce correctly.

Regarding question #5, my parents are totally fine with my new name, by the way. My father is a naturalized American (naturalized from the U.K. after serving time in the U.S. Army), and thus understands why people change nationalities. Because my father and I had the same first names, we always use our middle names within the family to differentiate ourselves. As for question #4, I don't mind if people I now see infrequently (due to distance) in the States who knew me prior to naturalizing calling me by my old name. The only thing I ask of them is to use my new name around people who only know me by my new name. If I keep in touch with them regularly and they hang around my new family, my new work career, or my friends in Japan, they tend to switch over time to calling me by my new name.

In the professional workplace (question #4), people tend to treat me like someone who marries and loses their maiden name: they tend to respect the name I wish to use professionally, although they tended to forget at first due to habit. However, when formal introductions were done with clients or other businessmen, proper names were always used — probably because our 名刺 {meishi} (Japanese business cards) were being exchanged and laid out on the table, identifying me as 『井上エイド』 {"INOUE Eido"}. As most of my acquaintances and friends in Japan are Japanese or are long-term lifers who speak Japanese fluently, they don't have a problem using my Japanese name as it's not hard for them to say or remember. Because my surname is so common (17th most common surname in Japan), occasional introductory small talk might involve some friendly banter about a famous Inoue somewhere.

Has it affected me in any way? (question #6) Absolutely. Much like how celebrities change their names for acceptance, I've learned that having a common, easy to remember name opens all sorts doors in the business world. When people have confidence that they can remember and pronounce your name, they're more likely to engage and communicate with you. They're also more likely to engage you in the Japanese language even if they don't initially know if you can speak Japanese or are a Japanese citizen or long term resident. I completely get and understand Homer Simpson's positive experience when he changed his name to "Max Power" (based on the setting on his hair dryer).

Because non-Japanese don't have Japanese family registers (戸籍 {koseki}) that lists the one-and-only name for a family unit, this allows non-Japanese nationals who marry Japanese nationals to keep separate last names. However, once I naturalized, I had to follow Japanese rules regarding legally married Japanese: no 別姓 {bessei} (separate last names) allowed. This left me with three options:

1. She can take my original last name, translated into either 仮名 {kana} (Japanese syllabet) or 当て字 {ateji} (forced mapping of a foreign name into sinograms by pronunciation or meaning)
2. We can pick a completely new last name for me, and we can become this new name, as a team, together. (i.e. "Mr. and Mrs. Incredible")
3. I can take her name.

I chose "C": to use my wife's family name. Note that I did not become a 婿入り {mukoiri}, which is a term for a man in Japan that enters the family register of the woman. While unusual it's not as rare as a man taking a woman's name in American-European cultures. It's usually done because of the power dynamic between the two merging families is such that the woman's family lineage is considered more powerful or desirable than the man's.

In my case, me choosing "Inoue" is like "John Smith" and "Jane Smith", no relation, meeting each other and marrying. I took my wife's name, but she moved into my 戸籍 {koseki}, that lists me as the head. The fact that we two Japanese citizens have the same (common) last names upon merging the family registers is technically a coincidence.

I took other things into consideration:

• I made sure that my name was not ambiguous was transliterated back into Latin letters. Transliteration is not often a one-to-one mapping, and there are many different styles depending on whether you want to preserve linguistic fidelity, pragmatic fidelity, or just make it easier for English speakers to read. Thus, I avoided spellings that had more than one way to transliterate (ex. どう→do/dō/dou/doh/dô, ふ→hu/fu, じ→ji/zi)
• I made sure my whole name was five characters or less, and the foreign part of my name didn't have more than four syllables (it has three). The best advice my mother-in-law ever gave me, when she recommended I shorten my name from 『エイドリアン』 {"Edorian"} to 『エイド』 {"Eido"} was this: "I'm an old woman who never learned a foreign language. I can't say and remember new Japanese nouns if they're too long. If you want other old people and people who aren't good at foreign languages to remember and say your name, you better keep it under four syllables." She was right. Shortening my name opened up all sorts of opportunities to me, both in my personal life and my business life, and I didn't need, nor did anybody assign me, a nickname because my name was too hard.
• I made sure that my name didn't mean anything else or could be misunderstood. For a long time, I used to shorten my name 『エイドリアン』 {"Eidorian"} to two syllables: 『エド』 {"Edo"}. I discovered though that people saw this and either thought my original name was 『エドワード』 {"Edowādo"} (Edward) and began calling me "Ed" in English. Or they thought I was being clever and making a reference to Tokyo's old name, 江戸 {Edo}.

The one thing I didn't do, however, is make sure that my new Japanese name could be easily pronounced by English speakers. I did do this with my daughter, remembering my childhood teasing due to my atypical name for an 1970's American boy. I chose a name that worked in both English and Japanese, so she could cross cultures without a name providing even the slightest bump in the road.

Monolingual English speakers have a hard time pronouncing Japanese names with a lot of vowels and few consonants. Because of this, I often use the American pronunciation for "Inoue/Inouye" based on the late Senator's official pronunciation guide: "ih-NO-ay" or "ee-NOH-way" or "In-O-yay". For my first name, much like my original family name, I use a mnemonic rhyme: "rhymes with Play-Doh®, the child's clay." Or if they're not American, English, French, or Italian, and don't know that brand, I say, "rhymes with Plato, the Greek classical philosopher."

Still, I got my first name from my father, and since I was losing his family name, I thought it would be cool to keep at least a partial homage to him by keeping a derivative of it. In that way, I'm sort of proud of the fact that it's in katakana (a default script used to represent names that have no known or official government registry kanji/hanxi/hanja in a 漢字園 {kanjien} country such as Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, or Singapore. To mean, the katakana says two things:

1. It acknowledges my (and my father's) foreign roots, which I'm proud of. This was more important to me as I was losing one of my names linking me to my father and mother.
2. Many foreign residents of Japan complain how writing their name in katakana makes them feel foreign and/or singled out amongst all the kanji based names in Japan. After naturalizing, though, having a 片仮名 {katakana} makes me feel more Japanese when I travel to other 漢字園 {kanjien} (Chinese-origin sinogram using locales). Other countries use 漢字 (sinograms). But only Japan uses its phonetic syllabet(s): 仮名 {kana}. There are naturally-born Japanese with all-katakana names, by the way (especially females).

To conclude, what name you choose for the next phase of your permanent life in a new country as a new citizen is your choice and is a very personal one, and you may choose any (reasonable) name that can be represented (reasonably) in any mixture of one or all of the three Japanese scripts. The conflict regarding using a foreign name or even a too common name is not a problem that is unique to Japan.

So, my only recommendation for question #2 is that you carefully balance pragmatism with pride and decide on a scale how much you want to give consideration to your roots and its fidelity over how much you want to have a name that is easy to use for your new life in Japan as a citizen for life. Having a name that is extremely common or famous ("Michael Bolton") name can also be a curse.