The Naming Game

It was Friday, and the last exam was over. The homeroom teacher that I assist was occupied elsewhere, so I had to take care of the closing homeroom session. It was easy enough; only a couple of relatively routine announcements followed by the regular cleanup routine. The kids were relieved to be finally out from under the towering cumulonimbus of exams they'd been under for most of the week. The atmosphere was very much a jovial one as they finally started scattering for the day. As sometimes happens, a couple of the friendlier girls came up to chat with me afterward. However, I was unprepared for what they had to say:

"Sensei, your kanji signature is dasai (uncool)!"

Woah. That was a surprise.

All Japanese carry one or more name stamps, or hanko (判子), whose seal (inkan 印鑑) is used in lieu of a signature. The one that is used on official documents is registered at the local city office and/or one's bank. Many if not most foreigners that live and work here use name stamps engraved with their name as it is written normally in Roman letters. (I have one of those, too.) However, some such as myself make it a habit to use a seal that is in kanji, or Chinese characters.


Typical Japanese hanko, or name stamp. Image from Japan Culture Club.

That's not as strange as you might think. It is becoming more and more common for Japanese parents to give their children Western names such as Mary, Sally, Lisa, Len, or even Johann, but written in kanji. Of course, doing so means that the kanji are chosen for their (often irregular) readings rather than their meaning. This can result in some pretty ironic names (for example, one common way to write "Mary", 麻里, actually means "hemp country"), but no one really pays attention to the literal meaning of name kanji nowadays.

Apparently not everyone thinks this is a good thing. Take the two girls that were talking to me then. My kanji signature is well known all over Ye Olde Academy and many other places around town. For (I admit almost totally pointless) reasons of privacy, I won't say what my last name is here, but my kanji signature includes three characters (松楠原), the first two of which were chosen for their reading and the third of which was chosen because of its meaning in English. If the whole thing were translated literally, it would mean "field of pine and camphor trees". Students at Ye Olde Academy have always seemed to get a big kick out of it, and they tend to get really excited when I reward their good work with a name seal on their paper! Not these two, though. They were firmly convinced that a field of pine and camphor trees was hardly an appropriate image for me.

Therefore, they set to work trying to come up with a better one. Making intensive use of their brains (even after those exams??!?), their imaginations, their senses of poetry and humor, and my well-worn electronic dictionary, they tried and ditched several ideas before finally settling on one they liked. This is what they came up with:

最感波

Again, I won't go to too much detail, but two of those characters were chosen for their meaning in English, and one was selected because it has one very irregular reading found in a historical proper name somewhere. Translated literally, the combination would mean "a wave of maximum feeling".

Wow.

Yes, I think those girls might be on to something. Now if only I could find a kanji combination with musical implications to represent my first name...