tacky Japanese names

[caramel_tea]

Setting: modern day to near future (give or take 5 years from now

Comments

[caramel_tea]

Thanks!

[harumi]

I've only just returned to the US from Japan six months ago, and I taught in a lower-middle class rural area.

There has been a recent spate of parents who want their children to be unique, so they'll choose common pronunciations with unusual kanji. Another way to make their children's names stand out is to do away with kanji altogether and use hiragana. Something else I've seen is typical kanji but completely off the wall pronunciation. It's why most places that require you to write your name also require you to write the furigana as well.

Other than that, I don't know any names that I would consider specifically tacky. I'd go with the above user and maybe consider naming them after idols, or names that can be easily mistaken for something else, such as a horrible bad pun joke.

Hope this helps.

[caramel_tea]

Something else I've seen is typical kanji but completely off the wall pronunciation.

That sounds interesting. Can you give an example?

Thanks for the tips.

[harumi]

Actually, if you're familiar at all with Death Note, Yagami Light's name is a fine example of this, but a bit extreme.

[caramel_tea]

Ah, I see. Thanks!

[busaikko]

I have two kids in elementary school here and friends with new babies if that counts as qualification

[busaikko]

But it's cute and unique! *__* And she only has to live with it for 20 years or so before she can change it....

[blackrabbit9]

Nothing constructive to offer, but dear lord those look painful! o.o Half of them look like the names bad fanfic writers come up with when they don't really know any Japanese but try anyway because it's so kakkoii desu.

[madsqueeble]

I saw 'tacky names' and I thought 'Hmm, this is the perfect opportunity to introduce DQNames!'

You're probably not looking for names as epic as Sensou and the sisters Kenichiro and Seitaro, but some of them may help solve your problem. :)

[caramel_tea]

Thanks for the link!

[kikuko_kamimura]

I currently teach in a junior high school, and absolutely going right along with the 'common names with strange kanji' or 'common kanji with strange pronunciations'. There are even more kids these days who don't even have kanji in their names at all, and just use katakana. At my school, I have a チェレーブ (Caleb, I'm assuming), even...and for girls, thanks to the popularity of Alice in Wonderland as a character (and also several bands that involve the word 'Alice' in some way...) I have at least three girls named アリス, some using kanji and some not.

One name I distinctly remember being strange was a girl named Maruga, a common enough name until it's written like this:　真瑠雅　(ma = truth, ru = lapis, ga = elegance).

[caramel_tea]

Is 優 read as "masa" considered unusual (and/or tacky) these days? This is a character in her early twenties.

[caramel_tea]

Also 誠 (read as "masa" too). Sorry about that.

[kikuko_kamimura]

I think it would be considered unusual, yes, especially for a woman's name. The standard reading would most certainly be "Yuu" for the first kanji, and the second would be a fairly rare kanji for "Makoto" anyway, let alone using it as "Masa", which is an extremely rare reading. I can't even think of a word offhand that uses 'masa' as its reading even in common words, let alone as a name. I'm in no way fluent, but in my years of studying materials from various eras, I can't say I recall seeing it.

I think a lot of teachers, for example, would be kind of wierded out to see the fairly common name of "Yuuko" 優子 read as "Masako" (which would commonly be written in such a variety of ways that you would probably be seen as openly trying to be difficult if you did use an odd kanji for it--there are at least four examples that are commonly recognizable...and there are even more than that which are common enough to show up in kanji recognition software.)