At some point you need to make that decision on your 当て字 name.
And it is difficult because you don’t want to sound pretentious and also there is that f*** 姓名判断.
How do you deal with that issue?
Honestly it is a bit beyond anything I could judge at the current moment.
Any advice very appreciated.
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At what point? You mean, kanji name for fun?
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I think it’s a little old fashioned now but some people actually do it for their hankos, especially for white collar jobs like finance and law.
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For my family name I just translated it (as I know the meaning of my family name): 柳 (やなぎ). It is not a common Japanese name but it seems to actually exist (that I learned much later, and wasn’t a factor of choice anyway), it definitely exists and quite common in Chinese (obviously with a pronunciation more like リュウ).
Funnily, for my vertical signature I still use a phonetic katakana rendition of the original language. Yes I do have an horizontal signature (derived from a Latin letter writing, even if it is unrecognizable), which is the official one, and a vertical one (derived from the katakana rendition of the same, even if it is hardly recognizable also).
I regularly use both, the horizontal one for official documents on the “put your signature here” field. And the vertical one as a paraph, on the margin of each page of multi-page documents, on the “sign to acknowledge you have read” places (eg communication from my son’s school, presence sheets at a club, etc).
I also have a hanko, I use it over my official (horizontal) signature on important documents (like work contracts); it doesn’t have any legal value (I don’t live in a kanji culture country) but as I do it consistently maybe in case of litigation it may be an argument that the document without it is definitively uncommon behaviour (and it is simply nice to stamp it).
And also on the first page of all of my books (so there is less chances someone can pretend it is his and not mine 
)
As for my first name, I started with the katakana version パブロ (Pablo), then after some time I noticed that 郎 is a very common male name ending, and I started to write パブ郎, and sometime after I changed styllistically to ぱぷ郎.
Much much more later, one day I did out of curiosity a Google research on it and saw that I hadn’t been the only one to write it that way, and found quite a few パブ郎’s and ぱふ郎’s on the internet, some of them actually living in Japan; so it wasn’t a bad choice I think.
If I had to go full kanji, I would use 巴部郎, but I never actually used that, nor I know how a native Japanese would read it .
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I didn’t know that !
My family name is short, so I just made a custom hanko in katakana.
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The fun part for me was the idea to start a Shodo class.
I like it, everything. The brush, the smell of the ink, like I just love it, really.
But, it wouldn’t be Japan if there wouldn’t be a massive problem arising in the first lesson because,
I am writing my name in Katakana, and there is no rule to write Katakana in Shodo.
For now that’s ok because we write 楷書 but once I am going to write 草書 (we have to sign with the name) my sensei has to consult with the director of the Shodo association on how I can write my Katakana name in 草書.
The thing is, I am the Forrest Gump of Shodo, I just want to do this for fun and I am not interested in starting any kind of “foreigner doing XXX” energy.
But because I am a stupid idiot who can’t predict what’s happening if you don’t keep your mouth shut, I mentioned I don’t like my Katakana name anyway because blabla, you know, just talking and then suddenly everyone is proposing to me an 当て字 that is elegant etc. and it really is BUT now I am really worrying on how to deal with this because if I:
a) keep using my name in Katakana my teacher has to go to certain lengths to find a style for writing Katakana just for me
b) I opt for the 当て字 and then I look super pretentious because that’s a part of a Kimono and I have a relationship to Kimonos like Jourm to Tuxedos.
c) I just lock myself up at home because I hate this situation so much that whatever you do you end up sticking out like a sore thumb.
I think I just gonna cry, really, I hate Japan so much.
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laughing in her coffee
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LADY Forrest Gump van Shodo (for you) 
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so what? have fun…i was a little disturbed by the level of conformity when i was there…I remember there seemed to be a uniform, beige burberry-esqe trench, white dress shirt, navy skirt, black stockings, black shoes, black or brown bag…then i saw a girl with the uniform but a BRIGHT yellow handbag and I couldn’t help but think “you REBEL!, you go girl.”
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I’m kinda cheating because my name is already a Japanese name (Anna), so I can take my pick of 杏奈、杏菜、安奈 etc…
but I honestly just prefer the hiragana あんな because that’s how women wrote historically in Japanーso much so that another (rather arcane) way to say hiragana is 女手.
But mostly I’m just excited to get married and fool people with my completely Japanese-sounding name. I can’t wait to make reservations/appointments and then send the poor staff into cardiac arrest when a Gaijin shows up.
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Hint:
It’s a good idea to decide on that name now because once you get married things get kind of stressful and if you want to change your name afterwards your husband will be like:
What! changing the Kouseki, Nenkin? …
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Yeah once I marry I’m going to get my 通称名 changed on everything to [kanji surname] あんな. Unfortunately, in order to change my legal name back in Canada I’d have to go back there for six months before applying for a name change which is super upsetting. However, Canada allows you to change your passport name without changing your legal name, so on the surface it all works out I guess.
Have you gone through this sort of thing?
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Like, after you marry? The last name? I can’t remember well, but I think I just got a sticker in my passport from the embassy in Tokyo. They said that I have to in any case register that marriage in Austria which I of course didn’t do. And there was some kind of issue afterwards but I can’t remember exactly.
I am a bit of a mess when it comes to that kind of paper work. 
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Do Chinese people in Japan use their hanzi names with a “Japanified” pronunciation (i.e., kunyomi and such) or just the preexisting one?
I probably don’t belong in this thread (no plans of ever being in Japan for a extended period of time) but I’m kinda curious anyway. I’m ethnically Chinese but am Thai so I have both a Chinese and a Thai name, which like most is annoyingly long (although I know of people who have it worse than me). I wonder if in Japan people would use the Chinese name over the Thai name, since it’s really long and bothersome…
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I beg to differ. Katakana are basically portions of kanji in square style. All the strokes used in katakana are standard kanji strokes, so the same rules apply.
For herb style, obviously, it’s different, but as there is a one-to-one equivalency between hiragana and katakana, you can just switch to hiragana if you want to use herb style writing.
(Hiragana are basically herb style renditions of specific kanji)
Alternatively, you can adopt a “nom de plume” for your artwork
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For me, my last name means black fields so 黒田 just works out perfectly. And quite honestly I just love it for its simplicity. Its also interesting for me to read on various people in Japanese history with that surname. I am what I am…a giant nerd for Japan.
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At least my teacher said that it is not used in Shodo, and the organisation she belongs to looks very traditional and all other students agreed. That’s why the idea with the Ateji came up.
That would be the strangest option because my name contains a letter that doesn’t exist in Hiragana.
One student even suggested I could write the name in Romaji but it looked as if that idea stressed out my teacher
It seems you are granted an artist name once you became really good.
And that’s why I am careful about adopting an Ateji at the very beginning because I don’t want to make the impression that I don’t respect the art of Shodo and just do it like a game.
Anyway, I think I try to “read the air” the next time and let the others decide for me. 
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I actually had an idea for a first name, but not for a last name. But it can’t be too pretentious? Man, that really narrows down the choices 
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I took shodo from a teacher for three years and had to think about this to test out of levels. I also had a hanko at the time. Ultimately, I just kept my katakana name.
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Sorry I don’t know anything about levels, what does that mean? 
I also prefer the Katakana option at the moment, for the time being.
It is a better contrast to the artist name I will surely receive in no time
The other women said, that according their 姓名判断 one of their husbands would be already dead since years, another one would have a serious disease etc, but none of it happened.
That’s not such a big surprise to me, but I am really surprised on how cruel AND detailed that horoscope claims to be. Like, your husband will die when he is 32 eg. 