My Japanese Name

Xuelanghu linked this Japanese Name Generator on her blog, and I went to check it out. the program runs, as far as I can tell, by generating random names based on the characters you enter as your own real name. Entering something like "pink dolphin" does not give you a literal translation, and though "Autumn Book of the Big Ocean Trout" sounds better than "pink dolphin" I find it somewhat offensive that the translator should attempt to make your name look nicer.

My own name (黄忠汉), whether in chinese hanyu pinyin, or an english literal translation (Yellow Loyal Chinese Man) does not translate properly, giving me instead crap names like "Upon a Well One Reality" (井上一真).

By the way, Cheryl informs me that Japanese first names all sound like they were derived from village locations because there was, after the second World War, a tendency for Japanese women to have casual wanton sex with men who had just returned from the battlefirled (and thus horny as hell) and, that being pre-condom age, conceiving their children. And then they would name the child after the place where they had made it. I find it a most logical and practical means of naming and remembering your child, as well as a good method of measuring your sex-lifeagainst your neighbours and relations. Clear winners would be "Nuclear Power Plant Sakamoto" or "Airplane Toilet Hayaki".

Anyway, not one to be satisfied by the half-hearted attempts at name-translation, I went and translated my chinese name into Japanese. Chinese characters are largely similar to Japanese Kanji, and my name is composed of characters that luckily have an obvious correspondence. The resultant is the rather funny-sounding Ou Chyuu Kan, which has the same literal meaning in Chinese and Japanese(yellow loyal chinese man), and are written similarly in both languages (excepting the last character, which is written in Japanese kanji as in old chinese).

Now, what about the last bit - the Alex? A quick Google run reveals that it means "Protector of Mankind", "Defender of Men", and "Short and cute but a liar and a cheat". Disregarding the "liar and a cheat" bit, I'm no more an Alex than a yellow loyal man any day of my life, I can tell you that (and so can my Chinese language teachers). My name, should a martian inquire, is pleasantly culled from two seperate cultures, one of which can be literally translated into the other, and one which has only symbolic meaning.

When I was in unit, I had this expecting colleague who worried incessantly, towards the fifth month of her pregnancy, about her would-be child's new name. She checked books, priests, parents, and sometimes even consulted me, though at that point of time I could have cared less if she had named her child "Under the Table in a Restaurant Chan". The etymological roots of her child's name seemed of outmost importance to her, and she was constantly fretting that she might destroy his (scans revealed gender before birth) future if his name sucked.

But what's in a name? I mean really, isn't it just another tag we put, in this case, on our children? Will you change significantly should your name change? And in a globally shrinking culture, does a name really retain much significance? What about all the cross-cultural marriage kids, the religous converts who have a take new names or the radical teenagers who decide to want to be more Americanized? What can you tell about a person anymore from a name?

This Yellow Loyal Chinese Man doesn't know what to think.