Weirdos in Wadayama

Marlene and Aaron's misadventures in Inaka, Japan

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Name Game Jikaku



The bio teacher, Ishii, invited Aaron and I over for dinner. We were super excited, Ishii is really fun, and we'd get to meet his wife [they got hitched back in Aug]. We had a great time, rolling temakizushi [the cone-style sushi] and looking through their Italian honeymoon pics.

As Reika is already pregnant [and due in May! Guess Italian food is fortifying!], they've been looking into baby names. Ishii's first name is Yoshitake, and his total name kanji have 25 strokes. Therefore, this 25 is a propitious number of strokes for the baby to have in her name. They want to name the baby Sayako, so they're tearing through kanji, looking for kanji reading Sa Ya with many strokes.

Confused? To clarify: Think of the name TOM, and imagine that each letter is taught to be written only one way: the T is a two-stroke letter, the O is only one stroke, and the M has four strokes. If you add them up you get seven, a lucky number in many cultures. The characters used to write Japanese can get much more complicated, with some having many strokes, but the number of strokes is known for each one and never varies, and the total number of strokes that make up both the given name and the full name is usually considered when choosing a name for a new baby. There are books that can tell you by the total number of strokes in your name whether it's lucky, unlucky, or neutral; and not only that, they'll tell you in what way it's lucky or unlucky.

Whew! Super interesting, but I just imagine the never-ending chain of father to child, with the strokes becoming more and more numerous until they rise up and crush you under their weight.

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