Society The plight of kira-kira names

Driven by a desire for uniqueness, many Japanese parents choose what is known as a kira-kira — meaning "shiny" or "glittery" — name (キラキラネーム), often in hopes of making their children stand out in a country where the pressure to conform is intense. Many with unusual names change them back to more conventional - and readable - first names.

Growing up, all Yuni Matsumoto wanted was to fit in. But his name made that hard. It was highly uncommon in Japan and, on top of that, essentially unreadable as written. Middle school classmates ridiculed him. The bullying got so bad that he eventually dropped out of school. [...] Mr. Matsumoto's parents were driven by that same desire for uniqueness, but to him, his name was a shackle. This spring, he went to family court and had it changed to a common one, Yuuki, written in a way anyone could read. "I felt like I had finally been freed," he said.

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Japan is far from the only country where unusual names are rising. However, Japanese children with unconventional names face societal and practical challenges unique to their country and its written language. Citing those difficulties, the government is now moving to rein in the practice while insisting it is not closing off space for parents to be creative. Within the next two years, changes will take effect in the law governing the all-important family registry certificates that every Japanese citizen must hold. The revisions will bar parents from giving their children some more extreme types of unconventional names and, for the first time in the registers' 150-year modern history, require notations ensuring that all names can be read as intended.


At the root of the issue is an unusual feature of the Japanese language:

In Japan, most traditional names have characters, known as kanji, whose meanings represent what parents hope their child will become. (For instance, Hikari, a girl's name, is written with a character meaning "light.") Each character — parents can choose from among 2,999 under the law — has a pronunciation generally associated with it, and those sounds together make up the reading of the name. Here's the catch: Most kanji have additional possible pronunciations, a quirk related to Japan's adoption of the Chinese writing system more than 1,500 years ago. That can give parents an opening to derive an unusual pronunciation from the sequence of characters that make up a name, with an intended reading that no one could know just from looking at the characters — the issue with Mr Matsumoto's name.

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The change in the Family Register Law will limit readings of the kanji in children's names to those "generally recognizable by society."

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Reminds me of a little girl I grew up with. Her last name was Hoar , pronounced like *****. Her parents named her Ima(I'am). I always wondered if she had her name changed latter in life.