Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/21/national/politics-diplomacy/foreign-minister-taro-kono-ask-media-switch-order-japanese-names/

by sanqui • 7 years ago

187 253 7 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

xxpor3• 7 years ago

English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name. For example, this would make it ABE Shinzo, which would remove ambiguity. When encountering East (thanks for the reminder) Asian (or Hungarian, for that matter) names in emails for example, I'm usually worried about if their "last" name in the directory is their given name and what they should be addressed by or their actual last name.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

When Japanese people write out their names in English, they often use this convention anyway (esp. in papers and the like), since it may not be clear which name order the writer has chosen to use.

ylyn2• 7 years ago

This does happen in Singapore.

GordonS• 7 years ago

Is this common? We used to have an office in SG, and I don't recall ever seeing it.

dragonwriter3• 7 years ago

English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name.

I've seen that convention used in English-language sources more often than in French-language sources, which seem to usually use the pattern (also dominant in English) of initial caps for names with none of the name elements in all caps. Is that really a “French convention”?

gumby• 7 years ago

That's not used in literature or journalism, but in most other cases (forms, etc) it is pretty standard.

madcaptenor2• 7 years ago

I've seen this convention used by English-speaking academic mathematicians (who perhaps picked it up from the French).

umanwizard• 7 years ago

Yes, it is extremely common and standard in France.

mrob2• 7 years ago

Some Japanese people do this already when writing their names in English, and Wikipedia's article "Japanese name" claims that it's recommended by the Ministry of Education. I'm usually against non-standard capitalization, but because it reduces the potential for confusion I support it here.

firethief3• 7 years ago

How is it non-standard?

jlv2• 7 years ago

My last name is mixed case, so capitalizing it makes it wrong.

pbhjpbhj2• 7 years ago

Wrong, or contrary to your preferred style?

I see names like Macdonald and MacDonald, where one family prefers the mid-capitalisation to another or family names like De Havilland. But it seems like a reasonable disambiguation to capitalise a family name.

Could you be more specific about what makes it "wrong".

FWIW my family name is commonly misspelt, life is too short to get too hung up about it. In my case it's just a name that existed prior to English standardisation.

philwelch2• 7 years ago

Perhaps adjusting the capitalization, e.g. McMILLAN rather than MCMILLAN?

kapep• 7 years ago

It makes all names wrong but I guess mixed case names are probably harder to read. "Small Caps" could be used to avoid that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_caps

mcguire3• 7 years ago

So is mine, but it would make life easier all around.

FabHK6• 7 years ago

One could restrict it to the first mentioning in any (con)text. Would that be acceptable?

HuShifang• 7 years ago

Agree. This is, actually, a regular (if not standard) practice in many domains of academic bibliography for Chinese authors (which is useful, as some individuals with Chinese personal and family names working in Anglophone contexts do follow the English convention of putting personal names first -- meaning that you often can't tell which is the personal and which is the family name in pinyin, e.g. "Li Jia")

Fun fact: Han Chinese surnames are almost always one character, but there are a very few that are two characters[1] -- usually, they're very old, very aristocratic names. E.g. "Sima 司馬", "Ouyang 歐陽", and "Zhuge 諸葛".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_compound_surname

jasonjei7• 7 years ago

I have seen emails from Japanese colleagues where the last name is capitalized for clarity.

Capitalization is particularly useful for Chinese names where names are not written in Chinese symbols (hanzi/漢字) because the romanized names could be ambiguous as to what is the first name; for example: 江劉鋒 JIANG Liufeng (where both Jiang and Liu could be potential Chinese surnames)

midhir• 7 years ago

That's interesting, I thought the given name in Chinese was almost always two characters. Is this not the case?

我是中文学生 :)

Funnily the first thing you learn in Chinese is how to say who you are. But there's very little help with actually picking a Chinese name!

TazeTSchnitzel5• 7 years ago

The European Parliament uses this convention because not every EU country puts surnames last, in particular Hungary doesn't.

yumraj• 7 years ago

When encountering Asian

Not Asian, East Asian[0]. Asia is big.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asia

maxander• 7 years ago

As someone whose (bog-standard American-style) last name is also a common first name, this convention would save me a lot of trouble as well. It’s a consistent source of confusion for secretaries, receptionists, and so on.

astrobe_• 7 years ago

Our current prime minister is Edouard PHILIPPE: two first names. Out of the 20 most common family names, half are also used as first names.

marshray• 7 years ago

    /me waves

NotPaidToPost2• 7 years ago

It is not that commonly used, though. Mostly on official documents.

xucheng• 7 years ago

Yes, this works well in writing and it is common practice in Eastern Asia. However, how about oral conversation?

Sometimes, I am not sure what is the proper way to introduce my Chinese name in English conversations? If I put family name at first, it would confuse English speakers. If I put given name first, the sound of my name feels so weird to me as that is not what I heard outside English environments.

dsr_2• 7 years ago

"Hello, I'm Cheng Xu. Please call me Cheng."

"Hello, I'm Xu Cheng. Please call me Cheng."

solves the problem either way.

EliRivers• 7 years ago

Just tell me. Honestly, I can handle the idea that other cultures do names differently.

"My name is something somethingElse, <whichever_is_family_name> is my family name, please call me <choice_to_be_called>"

sgustard• 7 years ago

"Bond. James Bond" covers all the options.

leptoniscool• 7 years ago

I remember some mail always uses capitalized case [IRS and SSA?]..

munificent3• 7 years ago

This doesn't work in media that doesn't distinguish letters by case. That's still fairly common for things like forms and other official records that only use capital letters.

Obviously, the correct answer is XML:

    <name><family>Shinzo</family><given>Abe</given></name>

yorwba• 7 years ago

Except people are going to enter the name incorrectly anyway, as you demonstrated. (Abe is his family name.)

gibolt3• 7 years ago

Any suggestions for surnames with only one letter? They exist, and would still be ambiguous :)

Torwald• 7 years ago

Place a semicolon after the name, would that work?

xxpor3• 7 years ago

Would it be though? If all caps becomes standard, and the given name isn't in caps, it would mean the single letter family name is the single letter one.

devy• 7 years ago

In a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases.

Another interesting common practice is that, famous Chinese names are already last name first - e.g. Yao Ming.

lqet• 7 years ago

In a lot of U.S Government Forms, "LastName, FirstName" format is prevalent, and there should be no ambiguity without messing with the cases.

Same thing in Germany.

SilasX• 7 years ago

You know I have to do it...

Falsehoods programmers believe about names:

- Everyone has exactly one well-defined "family name". (In Latin America people have more than one, and some cultrues may go by a single name that isn't a family indicator.)

- In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)

(With that said, if it's understood that those assumptions hold, this is a great convention and I endorse it ... at least for the first mention in an article.)

throwaway287391• 7 years ago

In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)

Don't these "falsehoods" just become ridiculous at some point? Like, am I really supposed to carve out special cases in my shitty app's business logic for the Queen and Saddam Hussein?

gmueckl• 7 years ago

Fun fact: some German names (e.g. Strauß) change spelling when capitalized. The letter "ß" is a ligature that only exists as a lower case letter and has to be written as "SS" when capitalized.

Names are fun. I recently had dealings with a company that assumed in its employee roster that the last word entered in the name field was your last name (i.e. anything beyond the last space). One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space. She was the very definition of a failure case for that system.

jorams• 7 years ago

Note that there is now an official capital "ß", after being adopted as official in 2017. It has been in Unicode for longer. The situation is fairly complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%E1%BA%9E

souprock• 7 years ago

That mistake has been fixed: ẞ

It was terrible because you could get all 3 choices in a lowercase usage (s, ss, ß) and then lose that distinction when capitalizing. You couldn't reliably uncapitalize such words unless somebody disobeyed the rules by leaving the ß unmolested.

Lingering affects will be with us for ages, for example in the rules that computers use to do sorting and searching. The default capitalization rules for Unicode can't really change because that would break somebody's database or filesystem.

kh_hk• 7 years ago

One of my coworkers was from Spain and had a last name consisting of two words separated by a space.

It's two last names, father and mother first last names. I guess the same definition works, but it's worth noting that any last name might contain a space.

CrowFly• 7 years ago

And some languages have no upper and lower case, like my native language (Hebrew).

Ultramanoid• 7 years ago

In Spain there are two last names, not a last name "with a space" between words. Traditionally paternal first, maternal second, although the law has changed to be able to use any order. Both must be present in legal documents or ID card, passport, etc.

It is a real pain for Spaniards living abroad. It is not a middle name, a two worded last name, or anything of that sort. Full legal name = First name + Parent A's 1st last name + Parent B's 1st last name.

Edit : As pointed out in another comment, a Spanish last name can be a two worded one, and a first name can be as well, and often is. So you could end up with for instance, a 5-word nightmarish José Carlos ( 1st name ) García ( 1st last name ) De Maestre ( 2nd last name ).

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

Sticking to a consistent ordering of given and (middle and) (paternal and) (maternal and) family names would also remove ambiguity.

yoz-y• 7 years ago

It would but then a good part of the world would have to change their convention. I don’t think they see any good reason to adopt our conventions.

dfrey• 7 years ago

It probably doesn't matter too much, but this is a lossy conversion. For example "Fred McIntosh" -> "MCINTOSH Fred". So the capitalization of the "I" is lost.

munmaek2• 7 years ago

This is unexpected and quite interesting. I think we totally gloss over the fact that we've just been writing Japanese (and Korean) names incorrectly.

I've always thought it to be quite odd, and there are exceptions too. Mun Jae-in, Kim Il-Seung, Kim Jong-Il are written correctly, so you might think political figures get a pass, yet Syngman Rhee is backwards.

knolax8• 7 years ago

I think for Syngman Rhee the reason he is known that way in English is because he spent a significant amount of his life living in the US and interacting with Americans; In America the convention followed by most people with Asian names is to use the English order in English.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee

munmaek2• 7 years ago

He didn't move to the US until he was ~29, in 1904. So even back then we got their names backwards.

rayiner• 7 years ago

I don’t think it’s correct to say we’ve been writing them “incorrectly.” We have been writing the English representation of a name whose canonical representation isn’t even in English characters. The convention often is used by Japanese people themselves (for example, in corporate directories). This is simply a change in the English representation to more closely match the Japanese form.

stordoff• 7 years ago

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).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoko_Taro

gaspoweredcat• 7 years ago

to be fair Yoko Taro is kind of an exception to most rules

TazeTSchnitzel5• 7 years ago

Hatsune Miku and her fellow vocaloids also seem to be an exception. They're not real people of course, but they may as well be here.

bitwize2• 7 years ago

I always thought Miku was her given name.

lmm3• 7 years ago

I think reversing names was only ever something "official"/"respectable" translators did. Names that came up in a more casual/fan-based context first have stuck with Japanese order.

smrq• 7 years ago

Heh, and on that very Wikipedia page, his wife's name is written in the opposite order.

4bpp• 7 years ago

I always was under the impression that a good portion of the news outlets that cite his name in the native order do so because they are fundamentally confused about what part of it is the first name and what part is the family name, which might be because the surname (Yokō, with a long second o) looks like a well-known even in the West female first name (Yōko, with a long first o, cf. John Lennon's wife) in the standard romanisation that neither uses macrons nor mirrors the native orthography (which would give Yokou vs. Youko). See all the instances of him being referred to as "Taro" (i.e. what is actually his first name):

[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-04-13-yoko-taro-...

[2] https://www.wired.com/story/yoko-taro-nier-automata/

etc.

marchrock• 7 years ago

I thought this was because his recent work were done under his pen name "ヨコオタロウ (Yoko Taro)", which is fully katakana-ized version of his real name "横尾太郎 (Yoko Taro)" but treated as one word.

viburnum• 7 years ago

The names in the credits of Japanese films often vary from person to person. Is it just personal preferences?

jasonjei7• 7 years ago

In Japanese? It’s almost guaranteed to be LASTNAME FIRSTNAME if in Chinese symbols (kanji/漢字) unless the name is written in kana.

金城武 KANESHIRO Takeshi

wccrawford• 7 years ago

Did this article put his given name first, despite being about him asking that the media put the family name first? I wonder if he finds that as frustrating as I do.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

It looks like it. From his wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar%C5%8D_K%C5%8Dno

it looks like his father's name is Yōhei Kōno which which suggests that Kono is his family name.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 7 years ago

You can also just read the Japanese pronunciation in brackets :)

Hamuko• 7 years ago

Taro is also a very common Japanese male name. Think of "John".

philwelch2• 7 years ago

He “plans to ask” the media to do so.

gojomo• 7 years ago

This outlet, like others, will follow their own official style guide until that style guide is updated. And, it appears Japan Times' style guide uses the ordering Kono would like them, and others, to change.

I doubt this individual example frustrates Kono any more than the general rule. He'll understand outlets don't vary such things case-by-case, according to individual news-subjects' preference, which is why he's making a formal request that norms change.

The headline would be clearer, both here and where it originally appeared, if it specified "international media", and used "respect order" rather than "switch order" – to avoid the interpretation that he was asking domestic media to switch to the English-speaking-world's more typical ordering.

apendleton• 7 years ago

I'm sure they, like most publications, have a house style guide that dictates things like this to ensure consistency across articles and over time. They'll presumably follow that style guide as it now stands until it's updated, at which time they'll change all articles to conform to the new style. Depending on the circumstance, what a person or entity wants to be called isn't the only consideration when deciding how to refer to them in print, and publications don't generally tend to want to leave it up to the whims of individual authors.

ptah• 7 years ago

yes, it made the article itself confusing and look like a mockery of what he is asking

Causality12• 7 years ago

Personally I think this is a matter of translation. In English the personal name comes first followed by the surname. In Japanese honorifics come after the name but it would be quite silly to ask foreign media to call Abe Shinzo "Abe Shinzo Mr." instead of "Mr. Abe Shinzo" or for an American to ask British media to not refer to American mothers as "mum". Sometimes localizing a name means altering it.

TazeTSchnitzel5• 7 years ago

But we don't usually reorder Chinese and Korean names, and before the Meiji era Japanese names weren't reordered (or rather, we don't reorder the names of historical figures!?), so it's Tokugawa Ieyasu not Ieyasu Tokugawa.

Causality12• 7 years ago

With the result that if I'm reading a random name from an Asian nation I have absolutely no idea which is the personal name and which the family name. Usually that's inconsequential, but it would cause problems if I ever had dealings with business contacts overseas.

jasonjei7• 7 years ago

I don’t think it’s just a matter of translation preference. I think it’s also to be respectful to the people whose names are being mentioned.

When Chinese or Japanese concert Roman names to Hanzi/Kana, they try to observe the FIRSTNAME LASTNAME convention if preferred by that culture. Such as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ (Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs)

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

This is something that is hard for me to understand because I wouldn't think it was disrespectful to be called Barney James in another language.(honestly I wouldn't care if they called me Barney James in English)

panglott• 7 years ago

This is framed as "respectful", but it's another way to mark the person as an outsider.

knolax8• 7 years ago

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.

azinman2• 7 years ago

Because the comma breaks English grammar when it’s in the middle of a sentence.

knolax8• 7 years ago

That's a good point. Perhaps we could use Smith`John since the grave character is rarely used.

firethief3• 7 years ago

The same way it takes two sentences to mention Mr. Smith?

falsedan2• 7 years ago

It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.

knolax8• 7 years ago

I really don't see how it "It disregards the cultural history of names". As far as I'm concerned the order of the names is just a minor grammatical difference.

firethief3• 7 years ago

We're already writing it in the Roman alphabet, but using the associated punctuation would offend you?

thefounder• 7 years ago

I couldn't care less about the order of my name(s) or my name itself either...call me Mike, Michael or whatever is easier for you (Machiel, Maicon or Maycon, Michaela, Michelangelo, Michal etc.) Why do people make a such big deal about names anyway?

tgp• 7 years ago

When a Western newspaper writes in the English language for a Western audience, isn't the most important thing to make articles clear and easy to understand? I understand that it's also important to respect the culture and language and the background of the person that you write about, but I guess unless you really want to have the Japanese characters in your English newspaper, it's a trade-off.

I live in Japan, my children are half-Japanese (with my foreign family name), but I have to say it'd be weird to see an article that writes about, say, "Tom Smith and his daughter Smith Hanako". Similarly, reading a Japanese text, seeing "トム・スミスと娘のスミス花子" (tomu sumisu to musume no sumisu hanako) would feel weirdly inconsistent.

ardy422• 7 years ago

It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.

Personally, I wish that was done more often in English. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense to wantonly import unmodified foreign orthography from on language into another. English is bad enough as it is. Word order and spelling (even for names) should be adapted to the rules of the language being spoken.

zapzupnz14• 7 years ago

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.

FabHK6• 7 years ago

This is fantastic. Living in both the English and Japanese-speaking worlds [...] I think consistency is preferable

If I'm not mistaken, his suggestion would make the Japanese convention less consistent with the English convention (while making it more consistent with the Chinese convention).

zapzupnz14• 7 years ago

It would make the English rendering of Japanese names consistent with … well, themselves. 安倍 (Abe) 晋三 (Shinzo) will be Abe Shinzo, not Shinzo Abe.

The Japanese don't reverse Western names, so Steve Jobs is never Jobs Steve.

RandallBrown2• 7 years ago

I have a friend who is (I guess) Japanese-American. Someone like his great-great-grandfather was Japanese and the family name has been passed down, but for all intents and purposes, he's a white American.

How would his name be written?

lmm3• 7 years ago

The same way he orders it - whether in Japan or in America. Japanese people don't flip the order of the names Americans call themselves. We should extend them the same courtesy.

FabHK6• 7 years ago

FWIW, many Hong Kong people have both a Chinese name and a Western one, and then it works quite nicely, respecting both conventions:

FirstWestern Family FirstChinese

Such as Andrew LEUNG Kwan-yue, Tommy CHEUNG Yu-yan, etc.

alistairSH• 7 years ago

Is that western name official (on birth certificate or passport) or informal?

ksec3• 7 years ago

Could be both. Some have it in their formal identifications, but many don't.

snthd• 7 years ago

I'd love to see names always included once in their native script.

Foreign Minister 河野太郎 (Kōno Tarō) 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.

ip262• 7 years ago

That kinda makes them seem all the more alien, inserted in the middle of an English sentence like that. You could maybe flip it with the native script in parens.

patio113• 7 years ago

I like that Wikipedia does this regarding people and titled works of art, at least heading their own articles. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar%C5%8D_K%C5%8Dno

FabHK6• 7 years ago

There is an excellent Chinese singer (of German Lieder, as it happens), who used to go by the name of Shen Yang (with Shen being the family name). Now, quoting Wikipedia:

he went on to win the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition.[4] After the win, noting confusion in the Western press over the name "Shen Yang", he decided to change its spelling to "Shenyang".

So that's somewhat unexpected, because while now the order is fixed, it really looks like he only has one name.

(BTW, Indonesians frequently have only one name (even in their official papers/passport), creating difficulties when booking flights, for example. Obviates difficulties with ordering the names, though :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_(singer)

sneak• 7 years ago

I learned this fact when reading about Thant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant

mimixco• 7 years ago

So does this mean the Minister's name is Tara KONO or Kono TARA? I can't tell from this article. I totally understand people wanting to have their names written correctly, but if the reader is confused, is that going to help people to understand one's name correctly? In the US, I don't think it would.

readyp1• 7 years ago

Represented as the Minister proposes, it would be KONO Tarо̄. This relies on a bit of cultural knowledge; 太郎 (Tarо̄) is a very common first name for males in Japan.

The article is a smidge ironic, though; in this article about proposing a Last First standard, the Times refers to the promulgator via First Last. I suppose they're technically in keeping with current standards by using First Last, since the Minister's proposal is brand new.

toyg3• 7 years ago

The article is a smidge ironic, though

It is reporting an intention from a minister. When and if the minister actually acts on it, by extending an official request from the Japanese Government, I guess they will respond officially in some way. There is no need to drop one's pants just because a minister opened his mouth.

headsupftw3• 7 years ago

In terms of Chinese names, my observation is that in English media, if your name is printed as "first_name last_name" then you haven't made it yet. But if you are somebody, your name will appear as "last_name first_name". E.g. Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping. When was the last time you heard "Ming Yao the former Rockets center"?

knolax8• 7 years ago

All four of the people you used as examples were born in the Mainland and had always used that order. Do you have any examples of people switching from Firstname Lastname to Lastname Firstname after "making it"?

yen223• 7 years ago

It's not about switching your name after you've made it. It's about western media taking the effort to print your name in the correct order because you've made it.

Permit• 7 years ago

Jack Ma seems like a counter example.

pacoWebConsult• 7 years ago

That's because Jack is an English name he chose to be widely known by. If he had kept his given name as a primary form of address we'd probably see him colloquially referred to as "Ma" or "Ma Yun".

headsupftw3• 7 years ago

Not really a good counter example as "Jack Ma" is his English name (i.e. not his legal name, not the one printed on his passport. more like a nickname that can be easily remembered by westerners).

If you google his legal Chinese name, you will find that it's never "Yun Ma" in English media. Instead it's always "Ma Yun"...because he is a big shot.

hyperrail• 7 years ago

There is an impressive amount of variation regarding personal name formats even within Asia.

In my culture (Thai), I put my given name first and then my family name (inherited from my father), like in most of the west, but actually my name of formal address is my first, given name, and my family name is hardly ever used except as a differentiator. [1]

In Vietnamese culture, I believe the given name is also the name of formal address, yet the family name comes first as in China and Japan. Hence Nguyen Anh would be called "Anh".

[1] http://blog.jclark.com/2007/12/thai-personal-names.html

abdullahkhalids3• 7 years ago

I have seen the following variations in Pakistan. Given name is what people prefer to be called informally. * marks if people strongly prefer to be referred to by this name in a formal setting. Prefixes are usually religious in nature (Muhammad/Syed) and then you are never supposed to use them except when reading out the full name.

FamilyName GivenName*

<optional prefix> GivenName FamilyName

GivenName* Father'sGivenName

GivenName Father'sGivenName FamilyName

Father'sGivenName GivenName FamilyName

Prefix GivenName*

My name is of the third type and as a scientist it annoys me immensely that my work is referred to by my Father'sGivenName in western culture when no one has ever called me that in real life in my culture.

tricolon• 7 years ago

My name is of the third type and as a scientist it annoys me immensely that my work is referred to by my Father'sGivenName in western culture

By what would you prefer your work be referred to, assuming a formal setting?

odux2• 7 years ago

I did not know that this was common in Pakistan. I am from south India and my name (and almost all names in this part of the country) are of the form. <GivenName> <Father's Given Name>. This gets less common as one moves towards the north of the country, where <Given Name> <Family Name> is more common. So I had assumed the Pakistan would be same given its proximity to and shared culture with North India. (actually the name is <initial> <given nane> where the initial is the first letter of the father/mother's name. When expanded to satisfy the north - esp for passports or in a western system, it becomes <first>-<Father's first> or <fathers first> - <first>. the reason it is that way in the south was related to the self respect movement aimed at eliminating caste among others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_name#Tamil_Nadu)

CarVac• 7 years ago

Personally I support this.

I think Japanese names sound wrong in western name order: most family names have a distinctive sound and construction.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

I think this is the start of the hockey stick graph in the unicode-ification of the world

We are becoming a closer more integrated world and we will find it waaaaay easier to have common shared conventions and regulations - but that does not mean we all choose an existing one, (ie cultural hegemony) we just migrate to a new one, more complex perhaps but one that fits (more or less) everybody.

It's fascinating (been fighting unicode legacy issues today so it's top of mind)

johnchristopher2• 7 years ago

Factoid: reminds me of a strip in a recent superman comics, I quote a villain getting his message broadcasted on every devices of the planet: "You really should settle on a common language or you'll never achieve anything significant as a specie".

mises• 7 years ago

I think we're pretty close with English, or it's at least the best candidate. Most of the knowledge recently produced (since WWII) is in it, and the world's largest economy uses it. It's also taken a little something from every one.

With that said, I think national pride will prevent such a thing happening. As an American, I wouldn't want to learn someone else's language as a "common tongue", though have no objections to using it for communication. Same thing with units: I'll convert if needed, but won't use yours. I've also got a bit of an objection to "design by committee" (i.e. esperanto) because it is either influenced primarily by one language (which goes back to the "other guy's language" objection above) or has little influence from other languages (meaning massive barriers to adoption). Most Americans are also highly resistant to bureaucrats dispensing "what's best" from on high, be it with language, units, or most other things.

It's also a cultural thing: how much tradition, history, and lore would be lost if we all spoke the same thing?

saalweachter• 7 years ago

Mi pensis, ke ni havas unu.

bobthepanda2• 7 years ago

In this example the Japanese are actually asking foreign media outlets to switch to the naming conventions they already use for Korea and China, $LASTNAME $FIRSTNAME. (E.g. Tsai Ing-wen, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Moon Jae-in, and now Abe Shinzo)

So Japan isn't converging with the rest of the dominant Western convention.

tus87• 7 years ago

Seems they get Korean names right more often than not...see a lot of Kim Jong Il (and similar)....except if they have a westernized first name like Gloria Kim.

MFLoon• 7 years ago

Coincidentally I was recently working on a project of localizing my company's product into Japanese, and the client who had requested the project asked if we could also address the name ordering issue. It turned out to be pretty non-trivial and we ended up not doing it, but a cursory search of our competitors showed that not many western SaaS products who localize to Japanese seem to do it either. I wonder if this policy stance will change that trend.

ksec3• 7 years ago

I really hope this become the Standard for all Japanese names in Western Media.

It is annoying when you hear how in Japanese Anime speaks and you have subtitle or online discussion using the name in totally different order. Or other forms of Media when you know that is not how the name was suppose to work.

pleasecalllater• 7 years ago

Yea, I have always this problem with people from Japan coming here. When they tell their names, I'm not sure if they do as they do in Japan or they do for me to understand. I always have to ask them.

woodandsteel• 7 years ago

I'm an English speaker who about a year ago got interested in a young Japanese drummer,佐藤奏.

The standard English translation of her name is Kanade Sato. However, when I use google translate on links in Japanese like articles that mention her, it is amazing how often it comes out quite different, including putting the Sato first.

I would also like to mention that Japanese writing has several different systems. First there is Kanji, which is straight from Chinese script. Then there are a couple of syllable-based systems, and finally they use Roman script for many foreign words. Sentences tend to be a mix of Kanji and syllable-based words. Also interesting is that there are usually no spaces between words, and the reader is expected to figure it out on their own. But if this might be too confusing, then a dot is added in between.

One more oddity. Kanji characters can,as I understand it, have more than one word associated with them. As a consequence, there is a drummer in Japan whose given name is usually translated as Senri, but sometimes Chisato.

Kanade and Senri together (skip the first minute, it's just the MC lady talking) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sf3DgS3LEA

planteen• 7 years ago

Working with Japanese colleagues and customers, you calling everyone by their last name with the suffix "-san". In discussions even when the person is not present, Americans still say "Abe-san" since it is how you always address them. Is "-san" only supposed to be used when you are addressing the person? I'm unsure on the correct way to use it.

asutekku• 7 years ago

San could be translated into mr/ms and you drop it off pretty much only when you’re close enough with the person you’re describing. If you use just the last name it will sound “Oh yeah, i had meeting with Mikey” if you’re referring to person called Mike Miller. First name is usually only used by really close friends and lovers.

The other time is when you’re using some other suffix with them, eg. you refer to them by profession.

patio113• 7 years ago

You should -san the outgroup (including when speaking about them in the 3rd person); you should not -san the ingroup. Whether someone is outgroup or ingroup depends on who you're talking to and can change.

There are other options as well.

In general, Americans who are rubbing up against Japanese people in a not-specifically-Japanese context get lots of leeway on this question. (One has to be good if one works as a full-time employee of a traditionally managed Japanese corporation; if one is entertaining a delegation from Japan at a US event, one gets a lot of kudos for trying.)

Note also that there are some people with preferences here, including some preferences which aren't necessarily socially normative.

pndy• 7 years ago

you should not -san the ingroup

I'm not sure but in that case it would be Abe-tachi?

gibolt3• 7 years ago

I'd personally love to see romanized Chinese/Japanese names contain a space between all characters. Westerners would still botch them, but would do a better job discerning where to divide the pronunciation.

favorited3• 7 years ago

I was working on a personal project recently which involved importing lots of Japanese names into a database for my app. I had originally made a "person" table with columns for "given_name" and "family_name" – but ended up going with a combined "name" column because I couldn't find a reliable way to determine if data from different sources was using the given-first or family-first convention (and I was automatically importing some of it, so I couldn't make case-by-case decisions).

This was just a fun app for personal use, so it wasn't the end of the world to just punt on the data, but it was frustrating nonetheless.

caymanjim• 7 years ago

Whenever I'm on a team building something new, I've fought hard to stop people from splitting names into first/last. There's simply no right way to do it. In addition to conventions like family name first in Japan, Spanish naming conventions create confusion (First Paternal_Family Maternal_Family), and there are rare outliers like mononyms as well. There is almost no use case--aside from perhaps a genealogy site--where splitting the name provides any benefit.

favorited3• 7 years ago

Interesting! I wouldn't have thought that would be best practice, but in spending a little time trying to learn more (this page from W3[0] was really enlightening), it makes perfect sense why "only split if you absolutely need to" is good advice.

[0]https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

aikinai2• 7 years ago

What about sorting, reordering (as in the article), or allowing the user to pick preferred order? Also allowing other data such as phonetic name to be applied per name (again useful for sorting and other features).

There are tons of reasons to split names and I’m just a basic user of contacts apps. This all comes to mind immediately since Apple splits names and Google doesn’t, making Apple products much more useful and elegant with Japanese names.

imgabe• 7 years ago

Whenever I'm making an app I do "full name" and "nickname" or "address_as" fields. It solves a lot of problems.

favorited3• 7 years ago

That's pretty much where I landed too. When I make the query to populate my models, I just go `coalesce(preferred_name, full_name) as name`.

ink_13• 7 years ago

Ah, you have discovered one of the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names[0].

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

aikinai2• 7 years ago

OP specifically said “Japanese names” which are bound by strict registry policies and do not have any exceptions.

_ph_• 7 years ago

As a person, who tries to be polite and correct in conversations, especially also written ones, I am completely lost. For me it is usually impossible to find out in which order a name was written as both orders are being used. I would desperately love to have a clear typographical hint, like all caps, with smallcaps for the non leading letters, for which the family name is.

Pro tip for email communications: please sign any mail you send off. This gives the recipient a clear idea, how he could address you, by just copying from your signature.

paulific2• 7 years ago

I deal with the reverse of this problem all the time. Living in Japan, my bank cards (and other ID) all have my name in the Japanese order, with my surname first followed by my first name and my middle name last. Without fail, the staff at the counter will address me by my middle name, on the assumption that foreigners' names have the family name last, so that must be the right name to use.

mshockwave• 7 years ago

i understand using family name first for leader/president or public press, but iirc most of the asian country still using given name before family name in their passports

7DA70964• 7 years ago

Passports have completely separate fields for "surname" and "given names". And the machine-readable representation at the bottom is always SURNAME<GIVEN< even for countries that have the opposite convention.

ymkjp• 7 years ago

My wife is a Mongolian Chinese from Xinjiang, and she doesn't have a last name like other Mongolians follow single name convention. That brings lots of mess to our life in Japan.

Firstly I should note that her Chinese passport records her first name as the last name, which I think is a widely adopted way; however, whenever I purchase a boarding pass for her, I need to inquire the company how to fill a required first name field in the form. Most commonly, they let me use a placeholder "MS" in the first name field. Still, even following their instructions, we face minor trouble at ticket counter sometimes. That is fine because the airline offers us compensation such as free first-class seat conversion. So boarding pass is a frequency-wise problem for us.

In severity-wise, the social security system in Japan frightened me. Oh dear. Very soon after I started my career, their representative called me that they would input whitespace (I guess it's in multibyte) as her last name, and told me that they could not guarantee it won't cause any trouble. Imagine you work for 30-40 years and the government's mother-AI sentences that you are not eligible for the national pension as your residential profile doesn't match with the whitespace! Not quite surreal to think about it if the AI learned the less diverse culture in Japan. But I digress. Currently, my wife and I consider registering the legal FBN to use my family name to prevent upcoming troubles.

Software developers, please have a moment to think of the NULL name when your product owner tries to set the first name as required.

kyawzazaw• 7 years ago

Burmese here, we don't have family names as well and run into this similar problem in all other countries.

hiroshi3110• 7 years ago

As a Japanese, first we MUST stop pronounce Chinese names, both place and person, in Japanese on-yomi rule. e.g. Beijing(北京) is called "Pekin". Xi Jinping (習近平) is Shu Kinpei. It always confuse me when first heard those name in English.

ahartmetz• 7 years ago

So that might be why Beijing is called Peking in German... Although the (generally closer to original pronunciation) English romanizations of some Chinese names are becoming more common.

Double_a_922• 7 years ago

It's called ~"Peking" in most European languages.

barry-cotter2• 7 years ago

Why? You’re speaking Japanese, not Chinese, and all Chinese characters have onyomi. It’s like saying English speakers should call Germany Deutschland.

apexalpha• 7 years ago

Dutch here, due to historical trade relations we also still use Peking!

7FE1CCE32• 7 years ago

That's how they pronounced the name of the city in southern China, which is where the trade started.

http://cantonese.org/search.php?q=北京

rswail• 7 years ago

The capital city of China is called "Beijing" in Mandarin and "Pekin" in Cantonese (as I understand it).

The Western world's engagement with China was via Hong Kong and Shanghai, where Cantonese is the dialect.

arduanika• 7 years ago

Unfortunately they'll have to get 51% consensus to change the algorithm, thanks to Nakamoto Satoshi.

ben_utzer• 7 years ago

What about this kind of names? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNoS2BU6bbQ

sunstone• 7 years ago

Japan has a group oriented culture so the family (group) name takes precedent over the individual's name. However a little more individualism might be a small step in the right direction. Certainly the Japan I know has much more in common with Europe than it does with China at this point.

thepra• 7 years ago

Best thing would do is to have a single field for name and surname and other legal variations. Like many pointed out the cultural differences are way too many to pull up with more than one field and manage them all algorithmically. That's a recipe for disaster when the culture changes the way they use the identity.

I'm a developer and I'm not gonna fall for that.

BrandoElFollito• 7 years ago

How should they be addressed, then?

Suppose we have FAMILYNAME Firstname, what is the way to correctly convey

Dear Mr... (formal opening ) Dear... (casual opening) ?

Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

Related Stories