It disregards the cultural history of names to suit what’s easiest for Western Europeans to understand.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
If Russians don't say Vladimir, that doesn't make his name Putin Vladimir.
The only Western nation that has a different naming scheme is Hungary, which uses the Japanese-like family-name-first scheme.
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:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?451988-5/united-nations-genera...
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.
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.
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.
For example, Stephen Paul Jobs is rendered from Roman to Kana as スティーブン・ポール・“スティーブ”・ジョブズ Suteibun Pouru Jobuzu
In Chinese as 史蒂夫·喬布斯 Shidifu Qiaobusi
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.
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.