When a Western newspaper writes in the English language for a Western audience, isn't the most important thing to make articles clear and easy to understand? I understand that it's also important to respect the culture and language and the background of the person that you write about, but I guess unless you really want to have the Japanese characters in your English newspaper, it's a trade-off.
I live in Japan, my children are half-Japanese (with my foreign family name), but I have to say it'd be weird to see an article that writes about, say, "Tom Smith and his daughter Smith Hanako". Similarly, reading a Japanese text, seeing "トム・スミスと娘のスミス花子" (tomu sumisu to musume no sumisu hanako) would feel weirdly inconsistent.
Other "problems" for Japan foreign residents:
* I'm of Japanese ethnicity but not Japanese, so must use katakana. Confuses everyone.
* My wife, also not Japanese, kept her maiden name; breaking all kinds assumptions on forms.
* Recently my wife has taken on Japanese citizenship and now uses the kanji form of my katakana last name. More confusion from various institutions.
* My kids did not take on the Japanese citizenship and pretty much stands on school rosters.
* And what about the katakana romanization of the names!? My first name has two different variations...
I could go on... but for name ordering problems, my bank credit card allows choices on how the name is to be used on the card. I naively picked FirstName MiddleInitial LastName for the credit card. This does not match any form of Japanese identification. So when I'm trying to buy say a SIM card, inevitably an exception is thrown and some crazy Japanese style escalation ensues.
I really don't see how it "It disregards the cultural history of names". As far as I'm concerned the order of the names is just a minor grammatical difference.
One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people. There will be people for whom the way one says their name is not a simple matter of grammar but of identity, pride, family history, etc. The Japanese respect the rest of the world enough not to reverse our names — Brad Pitt doesn't become Pitt Brad — so there's no reason why we cannot accord the same back.
There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name, said in a specific order, that is lost in translation.
One (admittedly fatuous; ignore that I'm choosing a fictional character, it's merely for illustration) example is the main character from the manga The Disastrous Life of Saiki K — the name Saiki Kusuo contains a pun (the first three morae sound like 'psychic'), but this pun is lost whenever the name is written or said in Western order.
>One person cannot speak for an entire gamut of people.
You're right, in fact the article seems to be mainly about the Japanese Foreign Minister telling other Japanese people to order their names the Japanese way in English. Notice how The Japan Times, a Japanese company, neverless continues writing his name in the English order in the article.
>There may also be great personal meaning or even simple wordplay in their name
There's a lot of personal meaning in my name. However, regardless of the ordering，the meaning and pronounciation of my name is lost the moment I write in the Latin alphabet.
In an Ideal world we would all just leave names in their original script (Which is the convention in Asian academia for non-Asian names), but we don't live in such a world; We live in a world where English speakers in the Midwest struggle to pronounce the foreign names of their own hometowns (See Pekin IL).
But a lot of people do come only family name. I'm not sure if it's different in America, but everyone is using Obama, Bush, Häkkinen etc. Heck a lot of people don't even know their first names here. You can say that it's because they are famous, but I'm just trying to outline there are differences. No one close to them they in real life would refer them by family name.
Putin's passports says Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin yet everyone is using either Vladimir Putin or just Putin, but Russians don't. (In formal letters etc).
The problem is that there are way too many differences alone in the Western world, you can't satisfy everyone's feelings.
> The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary
There are other countries in the West with different naming schemes than the one common in the Anglosphere, even if they happen to still have the given names first and some combination of family names thereafter; I've several times seen US outlets butcher the names of Mexican officials because they assume that the same name order applies when the order is merely superficially similar.
For instance, the headline (and URL) on this CSPAN piece:
There are several acceptable ways to refer to Enrique Peña Nieto as President of Mexico, but “President Nieto” isn't one of them, and Nieto alone isn't the same kind of name as an English last name.
That has nothing to do with name ordering. This discussion is about name order. I didn't think I had to spell that out considering the article is about name ordering. I should've been more specific.
It has exactly to do with name ordering, since the source of the issue is that the nearest equivalent of the English last name is actually the penultimate rather than final element of the name in the order at issue.
I disagree that this is about ordering. In no ordinary circumstances does that person's name become Peña Nieto Enrique, in that order.
His name uses the Spanish naming system whereby both the mother and father's name are included — like an English double-barrelled name without a hyphen — which is not affected by whether the given or family name(s) come(s) first.
Therefore, the issue is not about ordering, it's about name segmentation and culture-specific name boundaries; the issue is where given names end and family names begin, not what order they're in.
And speaking of Putin's passport: Russian international passports usually have the patronymic spelled only in the Cyrillic name, the international name is just First Last. So most likely Putin's passport says "Vladimir Putin" and "Владимир Владимирович Путин". I think it's the best decision - nothing good is going to come out from forcing patronymics on people who cannot even read Russian and exposing your citizens to all potential fuckups caused by name confusion.
Transliteration doesn't really come into it. Of course the Japanese would write スティーブ・ジョブス (but emphatically not ジョブス・スティーブ) rather than Steve Jobs, just the same way as we write Abe Shinzo rather than 安倍晋三.
Right. I am not disagreeing with you. I am pointing out that Chinese/Japanese both adopt Western name ordering for Western names in an effort to demonstrate that Chinese or Japanese name ordering should be adhered in English. Would you kindly inform me what I said is wrong?
When did I say anything of what you said is wrong? I was merely reinforcing my own point, in case anybody reading both comments felt any ambiguity; that the writing system doesn't matter, the name should still retain the correct order — and the correct order is the one by which the name's owner is called. We were both agreed, I was just adding detail.
I couldn't care less about the order of my name(s) or my name itself either...call me Mike, Michael or whatever is easier for you (Machiel, Maicon or Maycon, Michaela, Michelangelo, Michal etc.) Why do people make a such big deal about names anyway?
> It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.
Personally, I wish that was done more often in English. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense to wantonly import unmodified foreign orthography from on language into another. English is bad enough as it is. Word order and spelling (even for names) should be adapted to the rules of the language being spoken.
