Replacing a word's reading with another word

Navig said:

I wanted to know the name of the following phenomenon or practice:
Writing in lyrics 世界（ここ） and reading/singing it as ここ thus using both meanings.
Another simple example that appears a lot in Manga:
魔水晶(ラクリマ)
The Kanji show us the meaning - what this is, the reading is its name for all intents and purposes.
How is this phenomenon called?

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Navig said:

Also, if my name is 'water' in my native language, would it be ok to write my name as 水(カタカナ表記)?

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Navig said:

Also, if my name is 'water' in my native language, would it be ok to write my name as 水(カタカナ表記)?
For example in signatures, stamps or online boards.

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Mike Cash said:

For informal and unofficial use, you may do whatever you like.

Do you mean you would include (カタカナ表記) as part of the name? Or do you mean 水(ミズ)? Or just ミズ?

If you ever come to Japan, you also may do whatever you like in informal and unofficial use. For anything even remotely official, you will find that things will be expected to match your identification.

Foreigners can have a registered "alias" to make daily life easier. Historically, people of Korean/Chinese ancestry in Japan have made use of this so they could use a Japanese sounding name in daily life to avoid discrimination. It used to be possible to change the registered alias as much as you like, but people started doing that in association with criminal activity so now you can register once only and it can't be changed later. For that reason, I suggest that people new to Japan wait until they get past the early days when they're still in the phase where they're going to do what we all do, which is think up some totally ridiculous kanji version of our names, and end up permanently stuck with something that would make them cringe later on.

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Navig said:

Yes, if in my ID name is, for example, "water johnson," I would write 水( ウォーター) to facilitate things, and then people, officially, can simply use the Kanji instead of a long name that is hard to represent in Japanese.

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Mike Cash said:

It would facilitate nothing that I can think of.

And as far as official use goes, there are legal restrictions on who can use kanji when registering their names here anyway. It is pretty much limited to people from countries where kanji are the normal way of writing things.... China and Taiwan. Even people who are of completely Japanese ancestry but who are from other countries and have Japanese names which are perfectly easy to represent in kanji can't have their names in kanji on official things.

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