I just watched A Whisker Away for the second time with the kids. We all love it. But they, assuming I speak fluent Japanese, started asking what the names meant and why they were called different names all the time.
I don’t speak fluent Japanese so I did some handwaving about last names being used more often than here in Sweden (we go by first name almost all the time, so even Harry Potter is confusing in this regard). Could you help me out?
Especially Miyo Sasaki, why is her nickname Muge and what has that to do with Gaga and enigmatic?
The “hinode sunrise attack” is a pun, right? In that case it’s the first Japanese pun I get!
To add, from the Japanese the むげ appears to come from the first two mora of the phrase 無限大謎人間 which is the nickname the kids call her where that English phrase is some what loosely adapted from. The English was translated the way it was to try to make an approximate analog from how the Japanese shortening worked.
There’s another pun later on, when she’s musing on what her name would sound like if she married him - Hinode Miyo, which sounds like 日の出見よう, let’s watch the sunrise.
