It happens in the UK too but I’ve never come across them taking an English surname.
For example if your name is Chang Wei Yue you might pick “Emily” or “Catherine” and be known as Emily/Catherine Chang but I’ve never come across someone changing their family name to “Smith” or “Kennedy” to become Wei Yue Smith/Kennedy or even Emily/Catherine Smith/Kennedy.
So that’s why I say people don’t usually change their name upon emigrating (outside of a marriage situation). Sometimes they adapt it to the country they’re going to like my ancestors adapted “O Dubhaigan” to “Dugan” and then “Duggan” but they didn’t adopt an English name.
So I might understand changing my name on emigrating to ドゥーガン but I wouldn’t use 田中.
Oh my god looking at the passport it’s even worse ! This guy has a given name, a middle name and… some sort of a third given name ! Hugues, Pierre and Henri.
So in japan he would be called Huguespierrehenri Legrandusagechevalierfarge, and when he need to write it katana it would be : ユーグピエールアンリルグランウザジシュヴァリエファージ
If you would be a japanese citizen, you could change your first name relatively easy, but surname would be more difficult. Many of the the poor kids named “Pikachu” for example went for a namechange.
I also never heard of someone getting a fully japanesen name (beside nicknames) without getting citizenship.
Personally, even if possible, I wouldn’t do it.
With a japanese name you run into expectations that you might not be able to fullfill - especially if the people don’t know you face to face.
I like to make things complicated, so after marriage I took a double name (which is not my birth name, but from first marriage). So my passport reads like Name, First marriage surname-japanese surname geb birthname.
The “geb” part is the indicator for birthnames in german passports and since EVERYTHING needs to match on japanese papers, I’m forced to write ゲッブ for it. Which means burp. So yes, my japanese papers read: Name, First marriage surname-Japanese surname Burp Birthname.
If you are an artist, you can quite easily get an artist name registration and Hanko for it though…
If I recall correctly you can register an official alias which can be used for bank accounts and credit cards and the like. It’s something I’ve thought about before given my five letter first name, six and five letter middle names, and four letter surname. It would make filling out forms here so much easier. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve had to go through extra application stages and confirmation stages just because my name goes over the character limit.
Do you always have to write down the whole name in Japan? In my country you can usually leave out middle names. But then again we have a whole lot of surnames that are longer 10 letters and even 5 letter first names are seen as relatively short. So maybe that is the reason?
Wait there are character limits?! My whole name has 27 letters. Even without my middle name that would be 19 letters…
I did not expect to have to worry about those kinds of trouble.
I heard a few times that when you move to Japan legally, you can set a “Japanese name” that will be used to denote to you on paperwork. Which is usually the person’s English name written as close as possible in katakana, but definitely without English characters. Was this incorrect? I was under the belief that you could more or less put in whatever you wanted. And I could put in something like [Nanori kanji surname] ウォルフ
Yeah, that was the reason I was curious. I plan to try to find work there this year (if this Covid travel-nightmare ever ends) and I’d rather be “phonetic Japanese name”-san than “erikkuson”-san. But I didn’t know if people would take offense to me just slapping one of their names on my face
I plan to do that whenever and wherever I end up getting married, so that’s good information to know. I legally changed my last name to something random so no point in holding on to it when that happens
This is more what I was thinking of. Doesn’t this option come up when you’re filling in your paperwork to initially stay in Japan? I was told it does
I’d consider it as long as it stays at “weird”. Not a fan of repeating “ERIKKUSON” to someone taking my order four times in a row. I just wouldn’t want any angry looks from old ladies for disrespecting their family name and yeeting my 白いお尻 into it
Japan does too. I remember a story from way back where a Japanese couple tried to name their son あくま (I don’t know if they used the kanji 悪魔 or not). It ended up becoming a national scandal. Either way, it’s probably better than naming your child X Æ A-Xii.
How about “if you think it could be offensive - don’t do it”?
Try looking at it from an other viewpoint.
Would you hire someone who uses a “fake” japanese name instead of his original one, or would you hire someone with a clearly foreign name? Both have merits and demerits.
A foreign name could make your company look more open to foreign business. A fake japanese name could confuse customers or businesspartners, but might be easier to pronounce and remember.
As I said earlier, artists kinda get away with registering an artists name - but what would you do with it? Why do you feel you might need it?
A few years ago a US friend of mine legally changed their last name and they said if you’re not doing it for marriage reasons it’s a real hassle – you have to justify why you want the name change there’s all this extra paperwork and background checking etc etc.
As I recall they had a double last name (MotherSurname + FatherSurname) but one of those had been legally registered as a middle name and they were trying to fix it. So it wasn’t even changing to something completely different.
I’ll never understand that name. I get giving you child a rare or special name because you don’t want it to be the millionth Mary or John but this? He is famous (so everyone can look up the pronunciation easily but you find different pronunciations there too like Ex-Eye or X Ash Atwelve) and I doubt he will be going to a public school but why didn’t they take a human name/something that is pronounceable without a manual? The kid is going to be so confused when it learns to write his name. And he probably going to get asked how is name is spelled/said for the rest of his life even though he is famous.
Actually, I have one more thing to add to this discussion of names: My wife and I live in Canada. She’s Japanese and I’m Canadian. She didn’t change her last name when we married and neither did I. When our son was born, we put on his birth certificate his first (Japanese, but in romaji) name, my wife’s last name as his middle name, and my last name as his last name. But when my wife registered his birth with the Japanese consulate, she gave him her family name, and of course put his given name in kanji (with the reading in hiragana, I suppose).
So from his birth, he’s always had two different full names depending upon which country he’s in. Right now he’s studying at the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology (OIST) which is a Japanese graduate school but with an international student body where the language of instruction is English. He’s living in Japan as a Japanese citizen (so officially using his Japanese name), but at OIST, he’s registered with his Canadian name. This is all above the board, but it is confusing. (Though in fairness to @Naphthalene, not as confusing as having to put ウザジ in the middle of your name.)
Yeah for most things official things (bank, credit card, mobile phone contract etc.) your name has to correspond to your residence card name which usually corresponds to the name on your passport.
And yeah most forms (even written ones) have a character limit which has held me up more than a few times. There are usually ways to get around it but they often involve multiple phone calls back and forth and sending copies of official documentation and the like. It’s a bit of a pain, especially early on when you’re getting yourself set up.
Sorry to hijack this thread a little, but I’m extremely interested in your experience. If everything goes well, I will have to register a child soon I’m thinking of registering only the Japanese name (in kanji, from Japanese spouse) in Japan and the French name (from me) or French-Japanese name in France (Child naming is fairly flexible nowadays in France).
So basically exactly like yours, two full names depending upon which country.
As far as I can see it shouldn’t cause too much trouble, because each country have completely separate administration and don’t cooperate that much. But I’m quite anxious of missing something and getting screwed big time far down the line. Apart for some confusion in very international settings, did you encountered any major issue, like during passport creation or something like that ?
I’m thinking of registering only the Japanese name (in kanji, from Japanese spouse) in Japan and the French name (from me) or French-Japanese name in France (Child naming is fairly flexible nowadays in France).