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).
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.)
Actually, I was trying to imitate the naming pattern of the royals. All princesses had -ko names but used rarer kanji (e.g., Princess Akiko: 彬子), so I was hesitant to use 雅 and 昌, since they seem to be the most common "masa" kanji. (But I still wanted something girly. :)) But yeah, that is a problem.
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).
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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.)
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