Choosing a Japanese Name: The First Word in a Child's Life Story

A couple of years ago I mused out loud about how I thought my son's name fit him perfectly. Written 誠士 in Japanese, it means “sincere gentleman”.

Note that this does not necessarily mean “cordial”. Or “gracious”. Or “bothers to say good morning”.

My wife and I struggled for months to come up with a name for him. I was leaning toward ‘Kai’ which, written as 海, means ocean. I kind of liked the meaning. I thought maybe it would plant a love in him for the great outdoors. Mostly though I just liked the way it sounded.

My wife didn’t like it any of it.

We eventually settled on the phonetic version of his name. From there we had to navigate the deeply deliberative process of deciding which characters to use.

Japanese names can often be written in a multitude of ways; when I type my son’s name out phonetically, my laptop’s Japanese function gives me 200 different possible combinations of characters producing wildly varying meanings. The first two are “politics” (政治) and “pale gray-green” (青磁).

Naturally some character pairs are pretty cool: 盛事 is a form of success. Some can be a bit over the top, like 征史, which represents an historical conquest. Others are best avoided; 精児 for instance.

I thought 誠士 was perfect. My wife liked it too. But we had one more hurdle to clear before putting it down in indelible ink.

The proper writing of any given character requires a specific number of brush strokes. With certain numbers being bad luck in Japan, if you give your child a name that, combined with your family name, takes an unfortunate number of brush strokes to write, he or she will suffer a life of eternal earthly damnation.

Of course, we won’t know if any of this is really true until someone agrees to try it out on their kid. Or their car company.

My wife was elated that 誠士 contained a lucky number of strokes. I was just happy our son would have a cool name. In Japan you can get pushed into a flooded rice field for having a name like “pale gray-green” no matter how many brush strokes it contains.

At first, children learn how to write their names in hiragana, which are mere syllabic characters with zero meaning, much like the ABCs. In time these children will learn to write their names using the characters that do have meaning. This is where it gets fascinating.

Since the day my son learned to scratch out 誠士 he has essentially been writing “sincere gentleman” for his name. Hundreds and hundreds of times, all throughout his formative years, He sees it from others too, on letters and awards and notes written by his own mother. His name. His identity. Sincere gentleman.

And I wonder: To what extent has this influenced, coaxed, compelled him to unwittingly and actually become a sincere young man?

If I ask him he’ll probably say he doesn’t know – which, in keeping with his name, just might be true. Maybe he has never given it a conscious thought, but in him I truly and clearly do see a young person who will sometimes become uncomfortable when asked to express his real feelings, but will never offer up false ones.

It’s been the same for his older brother, 大和, whose name means “peaceful communicator”. When his mom is erupting; when his dad is seething; when his siblings are at each other’s throats, he has been the one to calm the waters, As a friend once put it in regards to his own son, “He is the glue that holds the family together.”

His little sister 桜, on the other hand, is named after Japan’s famed cherry blossoms. Sure, they are beautiful, but they are simply a thing whereas her brothers are named after dynamic personality traits.

My wife and I had decided long before she was born that she would be named Sakura. Now I wonder if we could have given her something more inspiring. Like Katsumi (勝美/beautiful victory) or Chieko (恵子/wise child).

Lately she’s been acting like a 上子. We may need to change her name to 順子.

My name, on the other hand, derives from an Irish/Gaelic word meaning “handsome”. That was never going to translate no matter how many times I wrote it.

My laptop won’t give me any Japanese versions of my name, but I’ve come up with a couple unsavory possibilities for "Kebin": 家便 (home delivery), 毛瓶 (hairy bottle), and 懸旻 (suspended mind, which would actually fit me I suppose). 気敏 means agile spirit, which I think I could live with.

With a little poetic license I could adopt characters for “gets paid to travel” or “wife buys him beer” and tell everyone that it’s actually pronounced Kevin, not “tabi-de-kane-morau” or “ai-sai-beer”.

But really, I should find two characters that combine to mean “patient dad”. That’s what my peaceful communicator, my sincere gentleman, and my cherry blossom would rather live with.