This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds, it'll be nice not having to go through mental gymnastics to remember how to call somebody in whichever language. I think consistency is preferable; it's surely not impossible for people to be educated on name order.
But the optimistic view is that the name order normalization is motivated primarily by the desire to minimize confusion among speakers of the language in question (in this case, English). Using the Western name order for Japanese names in English could simply be a straightforward way to translate names without requiring a lot of additional explanation to English speakers. That’s the same reason we almost always transliterate the Japanese names in English, and I don’t see much argument to stop doing that.
To me it seems like a better idea is to promulgate the convention of uppercasing the English family name in contexts where different name orders are likely to appear. I believe I have seen that convention on TV broadcasts of the Olympics, and it seems like a good idea.
Doing it for some languages and not others is inconsistent and certainly confusing as well, if said languages share the same cultural conventions when it comes to people's names, as it is the case here.
Again, having the Japanese following Western rules instead of their own as an exception compared to Chinese, Korean, etc, makes no sense. If we're arguing for adapting to Western order, then do it for the Chinese and others too.
The issue is that the convention in many languages is that the name order depends on the origin of the name in question. In Japanese for example, native Japanese names are always spoken in Family-Given order but English names are always spoken Given-Family. So then the problem is now everyone must become an expert in discerning the origin of names just so they can use the correct order.
I'd love to see names always included once in their native script.
>Foreign Minister ?? ?? (Kono Taro) said Tuesday he plans to ask overseas media outlets to write Japanese names with the family name first, as is customary in the country.
Implicitly that would be a declaration that the English isn't authoritative.
Japan seems content with "Japan" for now but they have been trying to get English speakers to say Japanese names with the family name first recently, but it hasn't really caught on outside of state organs. Note this NHK article about the funeral of "Abe Shinzo" attended by current PM "Kishida Fumio." https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20220712_31/ (NHK is a state-run public broadcaster.)
I do wonder why we say Chinese and Korean names in the proper "backwards" order but have historically flipped Japanese names.
Sir Kazuo. With some exceptions - Japanese people "normalize" their names to English name order of Given Name, Family Name when writing or speaking in English. Some choose not to, usually out of national pride, but it is most common to normalize the name to the target language.
Right. I am not disagreeing with you. I am pointing out that Chinese/Japanese both adopt Western name ordering for Western names in an effort to demonstrate that Chinese or Japanese name ordering should be adhered in English. Would you kindly inform me what I said is wrong?
I think taking people names as an example is extreme because when Japanese people give a name to a baby, they choose both a phonological sign and a kanji-based transcription: phonologically, they tend to pick quite a common name (like christian names in the west, contrasting it with the native-american names that are a lot more specific to the person), but try to be clever and original when it comes to writing it with kanjis.
And I'm not even sure Amazon has an additional input field just for the sake of sorting names. Isn't this a common practice in the country ? (if I have to call a customer, how am I supposed to greet her if I can't pronounce her name ?)
Why can't we just write names as "Smith, John" when it's in the Asian order and "John Smith" or "John·Smith" if its in the Western order? It would remove all the ambiguity using already existing conventions.
One thing this solves is the pronunciation of odd spellings of names, and to an extent, names that are foreign to the recipient (e.g. to an anglophone many eastern European and Asian names don't have an immediately decipherable pronunciation from spelling).
However, one of the problems it doesn't help with, is that different languages and language families have sounds that are not used in other languages. This means people will still get your name wrong, because they don't necessarily know how to make those sounds, nor do they even know how to hear the subtle distinctions - e.g. the classic r/l confusion, or my own inability to get tones right when trying to learn mandarin words/phrases.
I guess what I'm saying is I don't think anyone should expect this to suddenly make everyone pronounce their name perfectly all of a sudden.
I also live in Japan, and I have exactly the same problem.
I think the people with the biggest name problems in Japan may be ethnic Chinese. Many use the Japanese readings for their name characters in daily life, but some official purposes require the Chinese readings. Some Chinese also use yet another given name in English. I've had some friends who ran into serious problems proving they were who they were.
Addendum: Another problem that some people with Chinese names have in Japan is that the hanzi/kanji in their names do not display properly or at all in Japanese fonts, and even if the characters can be displayed they don’t have well-known Japanese readings, so people using phonetic input don’t know how to type the characters.
> By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name.
As mentioned in the article, only the Japanese do this. (Well, Hungarians do too, but they're not even West Asian.) East Asians except for the Japanese do not reorder their names. Normal practice for a Chinese person would be to use an English name in English contexts.
As long as there is symmetry in expectations, I don't mind taking this stance. If some English people get miffed when non-English speakers mispronounce their names, it becomes a matter of social justice :)
What I find interesting is that there are exceptions to the current practice in English. Yoko Taro (family name: Yoko) is known widely as Yoko Taro, yet most other Japanese game developers are known as GivenName FamilyName (in English).
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