Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]"
Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...
Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...
Real cultural sensitivity is accepting the social conventions of the society you are operating in.
I've never seen any articles referring "Jinping Xi", "Jong-Un Kim", "Jae-in Moon", "Zedong Mao", Yat-sen Sun".
Non-heads of state get similar treatment: Lee Sedol, Bong Joon-Ho, Yao Ming vs. Hayao Miyazaki, Akira Kurosawa.
This seems to have originated in the Meiji era (in the 19th century), when the Japanese assimilated many aspects of Western culture and traditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#In_English_and_o...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Japa...
Should we just print it in katakana too, so that we're not "culturally unaware"?
Japan doesn't get to change English naming conventions in English speaking cultures and civilizations.
Americans are exposed to Chinese names in both orderings of "Familyname Firstname" and "Firstname Familyname":
- "Familyname Firstname" ordering : actor Chow Yun-fat, and basketball player Yao Ming
- "Firstname Familyname" ordering: actor Simu Liu, pianist Yuja Wang, and Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma.
In a vacuum, I might have guess "Chow Yun-fat" as starting with the family name because I know that the hyphenated, two-part names are usually given. But a name like "Yao Ming" I might not have had any idea, since I don't have the cultural exposure to know which single syllable words look more like family names versus given names.
Imagine expecting a Chinese person to figure out "Larry David" with no other context.
Same with Jackie Chan.
However, China and Korea didn't modernize as fast as Japan. They didn't have radical changes in the 19th century. (The result is that foreign concession in China, unequal treaties, colonization of Korea, etc.) So they didn't have to change their naming convention.
The reason why Japan is trying to change the English naming convention when they write in Japanese is similar to the reason mentioned above. The 21st century is Asia's century. Japan feels that they don't have to conform to Western standards anymore. They are trying to be more Asian. That's why they are attempting to change the convention to synchronize as if they were writing in Japanese.
I hope this helps.
For famous names, outside of official dpcuments people will use whatever names feels right to them and I personally think that should be fine as long as the name is recognized.
Maybe not in Japan, but this is how some banks address me in the Asian country I live in.
That joke out of the way, as a dual-citizen and polyglot my observation is that it is usually Americans giving other Americans shit about pronunciation. It’s perhaps (like you say) a form of jostling around how virtuous you are. Perhaps layered on top of some insecurity around how much of the world you got to see.
It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.
Suppose an American guy named John comes to Finland. Should he still continue spelling his name as "John"? Or should he take the pronunciation as given and start spelling his name as "Dzon"? Or should he adopt an equivalent local name, such as Juha, Janne, or Jani? Or should he go with a traditional version, such as Johannes or Juhana? And what happens if he changes the spelling but his American passport still uses "John"?
The opposite extreme would be cases like Korean, with its own writing system not used anywhere else. Therefore, once an American name is written in Korean letters, there's no ambiguity in how to read it. So Los Angeles is 로스앤젤레스 ro-seu-aen-jel-le-seu, and everyone who can read Korean knows exactly how to read it.
Except... how do you determine which spelling to use? The sound systems are so different that there are usually no clearly correct matches. Also, how do you really know how these names originally sounds? Should Nevada be read with a long "a" or short "a" in the middle? You see a name Charles in an article, is he an Englishman or Frenchman (with different ch sounds)? Should we consider Einstein a German physicist, or an American one?
Two book publishers make two different choices, and you end up with the same people's name written in two different ways.
So, basically, there's no easy solution. You either pay the cost when you're reading (as in English) or when you're doing the transliteration (as in Korean).
I don't have an opinion on it but Westerners unfamiliar with Asian naming conventions can get conflicting signals.
Some famous Japanese names that are well-known to Western audiences are written "FirstName FamilyName" instead of "FamilyName FirstName":
baseball star: Shohei Ohtani not Ohtani Shohei
actor: Ken Watanabe not Watanabe Ken
Maybe those 2 constantly try to correct every journalist but I'm assuming they don't.
* Masahiro Ito
* Hideki Kamiya
* Keita Takahashi
Given the amount of work and confusion entailed this is a completely unreasonable expectation.