How do I spell my name again?

Next week is the beginning of the new school year in Japan. Japanese students are required to keep small name tags sewn to their school uniforms, and the school is currently working in conjunction with the parents to get the tags made before the opening ceremony on Monday. This morning the secretary received a phone call from a parent saying that her child’s name tag was misspelled, in other words, one of the kanji characters was wrong.

The child’s name included the character 希 (ki) but whoever prepared the name tag accidentally used the character 季 (ki). She described this error by saying “The name tag uses the ki (季) in kisetsu (季節/season), but it should be the ki (希) in kibou (希望/hope).” Japanese people describe kanji in names using this method because there are many kanji characters with the same phonetic reading.

Written Japanese is comprised of hiragana (平仮名) and katakana (片仮名), both of which have specific phonetic sounds attached to each symbol, with katakana characters mostly used for loan words or speech emphasis, and kanji (漢字), Chinese characters used to represent the root of speech parts, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs.

Thus a word such as 食べる (taberu/to eat), is a combination of the kanji character 食 (read as shoku in combination with other kanji characters and ta when on its own) and the hiragana characters べる(beru), which are always read the same way. There are numerous readings given to each kanji character, referred to as the 音 (on) and 訓 (kun) readings, and many kanji characters which are read the same way but have entirely different meanings or strokes, which leads to all sorts of problems for staff who deal with names all day, such as the secretaries at my school.

It is also generally assumed that foreigners cannot read kanji, even if they can speak Japanese, and I have had many faux pas committed against me under this assumption. For example, I once received an email written entirely in hiragana and rendered almost illegible to me because the sender saw my foreign name, which was written in the special foreign word alphabet, katakana, and assumed I couldn’t read kanji, despite the fact that I wrote to him in it.

Later today at lunch, we were alerted to another kanji name error, this time the parent had made a mistake in the kanji character when giving the name to the school. They had actually forgotten which character was used in the spelling of their child’s name. The teachers seemed irritated, but not surprised, as though this sort of thing had happened before.

They began to discuss it and one teacher told us about a girl he met who could never remember how to write the kanji for her name, it was too difficult, so she always wrote her name in katakana.

And that, they said, was pretty sad.

More from Language Log about the Japanese gradually forgetting their kanji characters here.