Transcript for:
Understanding Japanese Names and Culture

this learning module is on japanese names and biographical issues in japan so let's start with names in east asian languages not just japanese but chinese japanese and korean the surname the family name comes first as we've seen in our bibliographies and things like that and then that name is followed by the given name so for example the name muriogai in that name muriogai muri is the family name and olgai is the given name truth is that's a pen name that he chosen itself but let's treat it like the given name here there are no middle names middle names seem really weird to the japanese so here's some examples of name structure in east asia we're going to be focusing on japan of course but as a contrast object i wanted to throw in china and korea also so in china almost all the surnames are one character there's a few that aren't but almost all are one character and the given names are usually one or two characters long in korea we see the same pattern so the surname is one character and the given name will be one or two characters in japan though the surname could be anywhere between one and three and we tend to see two as a fairly common example and the given name can be typically one to three characters so here are some examples of japanese surnames hashi very common surnames that's one character suzuki two characters miata two characters and setoti three characters and the given name examples akira and that's certainly not the only way to write akira which we'll be looking at in another few minutes kyoko and osamu so we've got one two one character names and two two character names what about kanji and kana note that although most names today are written with kanji occasionally parents will give their children a name written only in kana and the trend to do that waxes and wanes over time it also happens more often with girls than with boys the kanji that are used in names in japan are governed by the government's rules on kanji use in other words the ministry of education as of 2004 there were 2 232 name kanji the so-called jinme yo kanji and they they're a those are a subset of the joyo kanji so of that set of 2232 parents can choose any of those and assign it to their child and the reading is an entirely different story we'll get to that in a minute but the kanji is limited by the government to that set so that it ensures that names can be written and read by those literate in japanese so you don't end up faced with a kanji that you're really unfamiliar with even if you're an educated literate person now i find this really striking in terms of statistics there are approximately three thousand surnames in mandarin chinese however dang long and lee account for 16 of the total think of that as sort of the smith and jones and johnson if you will of the chinese world in the korean context there are approximately 260 surnames but kim yi pak and chong account for more than 50 percent of the population i just find that fascinating four surnames and that's 50 percent of the population what about japan in japan there are over 100 000 surnames and we'll be looking at the history of that later on today very sir common surnames include tanaka yamamoto suzuki and sato but certainly out of 100 000 there are more than that so there's no parallel between that chinese example and the chinese and korean examples and the japanese example of just a handful of surnames accounting for a large percentage of the populations you have much more variety in the japanese context first i want to talk about trends you know there are naming trends in every culture i think until the late 8th century men's names often ended in motto and here we have a picture of kakino moto hitomaro who was one of the really important poets of the monyoshu hopefully the monyoshu as a title rings a bell with you remember man yogana that early poetry anthology so kaki no mo tomaro who's usually just referred to as tomato was one of the main major compilers and poets in that after that period men's names often took on a four-syllable structure something like narihira we see ariwara narahira on the left or michinaga fujiwara michinaga both very famous courtiers from the han period and in the tokugawa men's names often had the suffix emun okay from the tokugawa period but i thought it would be fun to stick the name in there so that emon actually uh carries over into the modern age we see emon still today uh not so much in people's names but in names for example in this case of a manga character an anime character i've also seen it on a series of mugicha soft drinks things like that how about on the female side before the 9th century women's names mostly ended in may or iratseme or toji for example otomo nosaka noe noiratsume was a famous poet again from the monyoshu she's one of the first prominent female poets of japan in the 16th century women's names began to take on the prefix of ole to express affection and then in the mid meiji we see another trend only five percent of women's names were written in kanji between 1929 and 1933 however 70 percent of women wrote their name in names in kanji and today as i was saying more women will write their names in kanji uh and fewer in in kana but it is not tremendously unusual for parents to give their baby girl a name that is only written in kana for which there is no kanji in the mid mage you period only five percent oh i said that one already go ben but here you have the photo that goes with it today male names often end in one of the following do which means sun but if you change the kanji could also mean clear or bright for example ichido great or thick like kenta or they could contain an element that indicates their birth order ken ichi means the first son kazuhiro likewise would be a first son jito is a second son because that g is tsuki as in next so if you see a a number in a name it often indicates birth order in a family female names often end in co child like keiko or me beauty you me other popular endings for female names include ka which can be written with a couple different characters as in hashimoto deca on the left or na meaning greens like ono haruna on the right reading names in japanese is difficult to put it mildly parents first of all like to give their children distinctive names so it's it's not uncommon for someone to see a name in kanji and really not know how to pronounce it it doesn't matter if you're a native speaker or not indeed names often take a different reading than what you might expect in other in other words readings that you will not find in a typical dictionary even a name dictionary because okay parents are limited by the kanji they could choose the government limits that but they can assign any reading they want to that kanji they just fill in the fudigana on the form and there it is it's really kind of crazy and sometimes it can get just out of hand so let me give you some examples of names and this is not an example of a of a given name that's out of hand this is an example of a surname that's out of hand if you look up those characters that we have here on the screen right here in a typical japanese dictionary say you're nelson's you'll find that the possible readings for each character are as follows so that first one's got a whole bunch of possible readings you should probably know this kanji it means long so it can be read et cetera et cetera et cetera so we have lots lots of different readings these are all the kun yomi and then down here we've got the onyomicho how about this kanji that one if you look up it has three different possible readings kokutani or ya and this kanji if you look it up we'll give you these two readings sen and kawa so now my question to you is okay given that information how do you think you read that last name right there and this is a really common last name go ahead think about it stop the video give yourself some time if you want or just keep listening these characters when they're put together into a name are read hasegawa yes hasegawa i'm not kidding hassai is nowhere in that list of readings for the kanji nagai but here that's how it gets read ha and then this one takes on say as a reading and well you can guess where the kawa comes from but those first two are just inscrutable here's another example how about you look up these characters in a dictionary we got go zhu and then this last one is arashi it means a storm i wouldn't expect you to know arashi but you certainly you know goju so you look up those characters in your nelsons and you'll find here are the basic readings got a couple four of three for the first one three for the second one two for the third one but in the context of it being a name the reading is not what you would expect it is igarashi yes no i'm not making a mistake it really is amazingly inscrutable let me give you a couple other examples family names are sometimes written with ateji so for example these characters that you see on your screen here that i'm highlighting would normally be read as shigatsu itachi april 1st but when they're a family name it's read watanuki which means unpadded clothes because april 1st is the traditional date to switch from some from winter to summer clothes and indeed we have an example here of a manga character whose name is nuki and it's spelled like that here's another one in the same way these characters would normally be read as kotoriasobi little birds play or if you're going to go with the onyomi but when these are put together in the context of a name we read them takanashi because little birds kotori play where there are no hawks there are no nashi hawks taka so it's taka nashi and indeed here we have another example of a manga character who has that name taka nashi here's some other weird and difficult stuff about japanese popular names such as akira and one of the most popular male names can be written in dozens of different ways i've listed some of them here on the left in the slide on the right hand side what we're looking at is the entry in a name dictionary i'm going to be mentioning later on in this lecture look at that it starts up here at the top akira how many different characters can be used to write the name akira look at that list it is downright scary and it's not entirely exhaustive though the characters that appear there have some standing in history in other words somebody somewhere at some time use those characters to assign the name akira to their child so you can see how difficult names can be so what is a student to do throw her arms up in the air and just give up no there are some strategies for reading names before i mention the different books that i'm going to recommend i'll also say that learning how to read names is like learning how to identify the radical in a kanji it's something that takes time and patience and experience so you have to be patient with yourself about it i've been in japanese studies for a very long time going on 30 years now and when i come upon a name i would guess probably 80 percent of the time i know it right off and then maybe 10 more of the time i have to stop and really think about it and make some guesses 10 of the time i don't know how to read it i'm not sure and i have to resort to some of these resources that i'm going to talk to you about so you should expect that skill to come with time all right so let's say you want to know how to read a name and i mentioned this before but i'll mention it again needing to know how to read a name is particularly onerous on uh on people who are living outside of japan people who are functioning outside of the japanese language for a large part why is that well as i mentioned when we were looking at bibliographies if a japanese person uses a japanese source and wants to cite it but doesn't know how to read the name out loud it doesn't matter because all he or she has to do is recreate the kanji on the page but for us outside of japan when we're writing a bibliography for example or a footnote and we're citing it we need to provide the romanization and the kanji and so we often have to go the extra mile to figure out how to read a name and that often ends up for me at least means that i have to go to the internet i google the characters i hope that the person has published something that's been well cataloged and the catalog entry may tell me how to read the name that said i have had the experience and i think many scholars of japanese have had this experience in which you're trying to find out how to read a name and you find two sources that are both reliable that disagree in that case you really just have to kind of go with your gut so this is not a clear-cut situation the first book that i'd like to recommend to you as an undergraduate is pg o'neill's japanese names i did not require this book for this course because it would really only pertain to this particular learning module but i strongly recommend it it's not very expensive you can find used copies you can buy it i think still in paperback it is not an expensive thing to have and if you're going to be doing any work in japanese studies serious work in japanese studies it is a very useful resource and in later slides in just a few minutes i'm going to walk you through how it's organized but before i get there i also want to mention a couple other resources of course jim breen remember jim breen we did it way back when we were looking at online dictionaries jim breen's web page and his dictionary has a sub section of names and so you can also use that to find the way that some kanji are read in a slightly different realm you could use a jinme jiten jinmei a person named dictionary however there's a caveat here most gym major 10 are not really name dictionaries they're biographical dictionaries and that's a different animal a biographical dictionary which we're going to look at right at the end of this lecture contains information extensive information about real people in in history so in that sense it's quite different than o'neill's which is simply a a lexicon of names and how to read them with a little bit of extra information put in there there are a few other name dictionaries out there but i'm not going to mention them because i don't think they're necessarily better and they are certainly much more expensive my only beef with o'neills is that in my own experience it tends to be kind of hone shoe centric so i've spent a lot of my time in japan in kyushu for example and have friends whose surnames are not in o'neills and after a little bit of experiment i concluded that that was because o'neill was really focusing on sort of central japan and not so much on the periphery that said it's still a really good resource and before i go any further i also want to point out just one little thing a lot of people a lot of japanese prefer to use complex kanji when they write their names even if simplification has already been adopted when they're born they it just kind of i guess it adds a little bit of class to somebody's name so as an example here i have a picture of onizawa who chooses to write his name like this the zawa is complex but you could also google him under this and find him so if you're looking for a name and it doesn't come up right away remember that you might need to consider a complex version and or a simplified version depending on what you're starting with okay so let's look a little more closely at o'neill's japanese names so that you understand uh what it is it's organized in in two ways in two big sections front and back uh the first part is organized from the kanji to the reading so if you're looking at a kanji and you don't know how to read it you can look it up and find assorted possible readings and then the second half is done in the opposite direction so you can look up names it's not done by iuo it's actually done by abc and it's in in romanization but same idea so phonetic presentation and then it will give you the various kanji that could be read that way and i'm going to show you examples of that the one thing i also wanted to point out though is that o'neills doesn't have details for example it doesn't give you birth and death dates of people or anything like that it does give you basic information as you'll see it includes people's names and place names so actually its title g major 10 is a little bit deceptive because it is both a g major 10 and also a chi meji 10 qi as in place or earth and so a team meiji 10 is a geographical dictionary we're going to be looking at chi mage 10 later on in a different learning module but o'neill's covers both of those because people name people names and place names in japanese suffer from the same sorts of bibliographic problems in other words you often see a place name and you're not really sure how to pronounce it to be fair there's a lot of places in the united states that are like that even though we're functioning with in theory a phonetic system i'm sure you can think of places near your hometown if not your hometown itself whose name is pronounced differently than outsiders might think one of my favorite examples is uh there's a there's a town in new jersey called pagoda which anybody else would look at and think it's bogota but they pronounce it pagoda in ohio there's a town called ashtabula which i think anybody on the outside would pronounce as stabula but in ohio it's pronounced ashtabula there it is okay here's an example of a page from o'neill's and this is the page where we we we're looking something up phonetically and then we're looking to see what the kanji possibilities are so let me give you a little bit of a a tour if you will of this kind of entry and i know this is kind of small on the screen so i'm going to blow it up a little bit and we'll look at what our possibilities are now this particular page starts with the surname size oh that and that well actually that sizo begins on the previous page and so that this little squiggly line that you see means that the name is saizo ryoku and um here saizo lu these were real people okay um and the m means male and the l means literary and here we have the kanji for his name but that's all the information that we get we get how to pronounce his name we know he was a historical figure in literature we don't know when he was born we don't know when he died we don't know anything else so that's the kind of information we would find in a bibliographic dictionary but not here likewise scizodu or this is actually cito right you is a male figure a literary male figure eventually we get out of that subcategory that subgroup and we get to sizo and that's it it's not a double name it's not saito yoku or saitodu or or saitosanki or anything like that okay instead it's sizo and then an m this means that this is a male name but it's not referring to a specific person in history in other words probably more than one male has been named using those kanji in history what are these numbers we can probably make a guess this dictionary like most dictionaries assigns a discrete number to each kanji and so for example here 1803 is the number of that first kanji in the two kanji compound so you could look this up you could sort of reverse look it up if you wanted to saizo's shoe this is not a person's name and actually it's not a geographical name either it's a literary title that's what the l is remember l stands for literary so the dictionary includes quite a lot down here we have saji with an s and a p the s means that this can be a surname and the p means that it can be a place name likewise sagier is a man's name a masculine name a male name etc etc so some of these are kind of generic names some of them are actual people in history some of them are literary titles some of them are place names there's quite a variety here so this is that part of the dictionary where you're going from phonetics over to kanji how about that other part here's what a page looks like in the part where you're starting with the kanji and then finding out what the possible readings could be again this is kind of small so i'm going to blow it up a little bit you can see a little bit more clearly this is organized according to the 214 kangshi radical system also there's an index in the back of the book so if you need to find the kanji you have no idea how it's read you can use the same skills that you have developed using your nelsons to use the o'neill's name dictionary so what do we have well for example here we have a kanji whose discrete number is 715 and then after the character and its number we have that n in the square bracket and that means that the character has been approved for use in names and then after that we have a whole bunch of choices masashi which is a male name masaru which is also a male name sakan akira sakaye and then in parentheses yoshi okay so let's break this down that character alone if you saw it in a name could be read masashi or masaru or sakan or akira or sakaye yeah thank thanks a lot that helps but there it is it's better than nothing right um how are you going to figure out which one is correct again if you're like me you thank your lucky stars that there is the internet and you try googling the person's name and you try and try and figure out if somebody's glossed it maybe in a library catalog or something like that now what about the stuff what about the readings in the parentheses those are readings that are possible when that kanji is combined with another one so for example one of the possible readings is masu and so if we take this kanji and we compare it or we combine it with this one we would read that masa each sorry masu ichi and that's a male name but we could take that character and combine it with this one in which case we would read the name akiko and it would be a female name so this is how all of these characters are organized and there is a a handy list of abbreviations and signs for all the different possible notes indicators that they have here in the dictionary all right so that's how you kind of learn how to read names it helps a little bit now i'd like to discuss a few cultural issues associated with names that are this is handy to know when you're working in a japanese context in japan one person in each marriage must take his or her spouse's name and this is distinct from for example the chinese system in which married couples maintain their birth names and and and the japanese system is very similar of course to the system that we're accustomed to in the united states usually the woman takes the man's name but sometimes the man takes the woman's name this doesn't happen very often in the united states very rarely as a matter of fact i've only known one person who's ever done that this happens when the woman's family has no male heir and needs someone to continue on the family line so uh usually if a man takes the woman's family's name and i'm going to be seeing more about that in just a second he is probably not going to be the first born in his own family because generally speaking the first born male is expected to carry on the family line traditionally in a japanese family but say a second or a third or whatever born son can then be sent off to another family and become the head of household for that particular family let me explain a little bit more about what that means but before i do i'll say parenthetically that there are exceptions to this rule if a japanese marries a foreigner japan is getting a little more flexible about foreigners marrying japanese and living in japan and being part of the fabric if you will of of society but there are still some exceptions to this rule and they're much more complicated than we need to get into okay so this brings me to the concept of a koseki this is something that we don't have in the united states kosaki is usually translated as a family registry uh the kosaki what role does it serve it simultaneously fills the function of birth certificates death certificates marriage licenses and the census these are standards in the american context these sorts of documents and the koseki kind of takes place of all those things a typical koseki has one page for the household's parents and their first two children and then additional children are recorded on additional pages any changes to information have to be sealed have to be stamped if you will by an official registrar a government registrar so koseki this family registry is typically kept in a municipal office as the formal record of of particular households so the following items are recorded in a koseki according to the law of family register you'll have the family name and given name of the members the date of birth the date of records and the causes in other words changes and what caused those change so marriage death adoption things like that names of the father and the mother and the relation to them and if adopted names of the adoptive father and mother and if married whether a person is a husband or a wife and if transferred from another koseki the former koseki so if some in that previous example if a man marries a woman takes on her surname then he's officially transferred from his family's koseki to her family's koseki uh so that's what i mean by he's transferred and also the terminology that you may read or hear when that happens is that he has been adopted into his wife's family so normally in english when we hear the word adoption we think about children but adoption in this context also includes adults so to adopt here in the japanese context is simply to move from one family registry to a second family registry your age is kind of irrelevant and the final thing uh in a koseki is a registered residence where do you live so if you move then you have to tell the authorities that you're moving the koseki is a time-honored tradition in japan it's been around a very long time and it's something that the japanese really take for granted and something that foreigners really have a hard time wrapping their brains around so now i want to switch gears again and talk a little bit about historical naming practices we we've been looking at trends a little bit but separate from that there's still much in the way of traditional convention and custom in bestowing names in early japan a man from the upper ranks would often have uh the following first he would have what's known as a yomei or a domio a child name which was used until he came of age and then he would also have a sushil a current name and finally a jitsumio or a true name now what are these things and how are they used well um the child name is given by the parents so the child is born the parents give the child a name the current name then was commonly used with the commonly used name in adulthood once somebody came of age then they would be using the current name instead and the true name was chosen by the person himself upon adulthood it was considered an intimate name it was rarely used but the jitsu means true right that's my true identity so uh when one became an adult one then chose a name that one felt was particular particularly fitting and this is this is early japan now in addition to um this this practice across japanese history we also see uh the japanese adopting a chinese system if you will and we're going to see examples of this in the biographical dictionary entry that we're going to look at in a couple minutes so in this chinese system of names there are different uh categories there's what's known as an azana or a g and yeah that's the kanji kanji no g that's a name that's bestowed upon somebody by a master or a teacher so if you're a disciple your master your teacher might give you an asana or a g there's also what's known as a goal as in bango nogo and that's a name that you choose yourself like writers choose a pen name or artist can choose a pen name scholars in chinese history and japanese history often will see we'll choose a name a goal and then there's a homo which is the names of buddhist priests okay so this sort of separate category for the buddhist priests now in modern japan these practices have all but disappeared the exception is the posthumous name of which two types are still important the okorina and the kaimyo the conferred name and the precept name so you might still run into those i say in modern japan uh when did these really fall out of favor i would say uh end of the meiji period the okurina is the name that the emperor or some other amazing exalted person takes after death so for example hirohito was called hirohito while he was alive uh at least by the americans and but then he's called the emperor after he died and a caimo is a buddhist posthumous name people still care about um getting caimio and of course authors and artists sometimes take pen names uh alternate names a pen name or an artistic name i don't think that's ever going to change and of course we see that tradition in the west also so a little bit about the history of names and this brings us full circle back to the beginning of the lecture in which we were looking at the tremendous number of surnames that exist in japan over 100 000 which is just a remarkable contrast with china and japan but in japan actually most surnames are relatively new so to try and put this history in a little nutshell the imperial and the upper ranking families had surnames fairly early on so we're talking about the heian period the fujiwara that's a name that you should be familiar with if you know anything about japanese history the fujiwara were the most prestigious family in the heian court and they were inextricably tied with the imperial family then then there was also the taira and the minamoto but surnames were restricted to the aristocracy the military and a few select artisans and by saying that i'm really kind of making a huge sweep across time and i'll give you a little more detail in a minute but uh what i mean by huge sweep all the way from the hand into the tokugawa okay what about everybody else what about those peasants out in the field etc etc those folks are just using their given names or some combination of what i was talking about a childhood name and a um usual name in etsy show and things like that okay but we're not looking at a situation where there's consistently a surname and a given name so if you're a peasant you have a name you don't have two if that makes sense so the two types of names given to groups within society back in early early early japan we're talking that not a period so this is the 8th century generally the nara period is identified as early 8th century till the late 8th century not even 100 years these two types of names were the uji to indicate a clan and a cabane a hereditary title of nobility kawane were used after the name of the uji and before the given name between the uzi and the given name one often sees a no as in taira no kiyomori okay there's that titan name that we were just looking at and you should be familiar with taira no kiromo because tara nokiomori was the wonderful villain from the tale of the heike when the fujiwara clan spun off sub-clans let me say a little bit about that i always i always explain it this way and i'm probably offend historians as i do it but um simply put what happened was that the the fujiwara clan was extensive it was and it was of course supported by tax money and eventually it just became untenable to have such a huge extended clan and so eventually what happens is the fujiwada spin off those distant cousins and they create separate clans and gave them surnames and a lot of those and and those surnames ended with the kanji uh that is read here fuji uh but it's onyomi is tol to indicate that connection so uh if you're if your surname had that kanji in it then there is some sort of kind of tenuous connection to the fujiwara family so as an example here's a whole bunch of surnames many of which are still really common in japan today that use that character atto ando ando is really common ito super common eto endo also super common saito sato and so that's that's where that particular combination comes from and actually you can think about some of these like this one endo it's far away from the fujiwara maybe they were i'm not sure about the etymology of it but i'm guessing that the endo geographically were further away from the capital okay so how about the kamakura through the tokugawa that and what we were just looking at in the previous slide is really the hang on period and now i'm going to again make a huge general sweeping statement about a big chunk of japanese history military families in rural areas added the name of their locality often to their names but commoners were still limited to using only their given names we don't read too much about commoners in the literature so it's easy to read japanese literature all the way back to the kamakura period and assume that surnames were du riger that everybody had them because the people who get mentioned in the literature are the upper echelon the top crust of society the folks who belong to either somali military families or to the aristocratic echelon but actually the com still throughout this period the commoners are limited to just using their given names so now i'm going to fast forward all the way to the end of the tokugawa period in 1868 that restriction of people not being allowed to have surnames it was a big honor actually to to have a surname that was lifted and all japanese then from that point forward were permitted to take a surname if they chose and this must have been largely due to the example of the west in which most people have surnames and given names and the japanese were so rapidly modernizing and westernizing that this seemed kind of a natural move and so they decided okay we'll lift that ban now anybody can decide that they that they can't have a surname if they want it and then in 1875 it turns out a lot of people didn't really care they didn't take a surname uh but it would it this mean things difficult for the government i mean nothing else think imagine trying to take a really good census and keep track of your population and so in 1875 the government required everyone to take a surname you wake up in the morning and now this is new law okay you have to have one of these and so what they did was um the government sent out officials across the land to enforce this rule and essentially help people pick out names or assign names to folks who were illiterate or didn't really know what they were doing if i had a time machine i would love to go back to this point in japanese history so the names that people typically chose had something to do with where they lived like tanaka i'm in the fields because i'm a farmer all the time right or yamada i you know i'm i'm in the fields next to the mountains i'm in the mountain fields or sometimes they would end up with a surname that was connected with whatever their profession was anyway the the majority of the population at this point in japanese history is still a farmer peasant society and so consequently many japanese even today have kind of surprisingly pastoral surnames even though most japanese today live in an urban environment their names sound like they're living on a farm and one of the funnier stories that i've heard about this whole process is that these officials would go out to the villages and they essentially were given a mandate i have to give everybody a surname before i move on to the next village and that was a it was an onerous task and so sometimes an entire village would be assigned the same name by government official because it was it was too much to give each individual something distinct and so he just okay you know everybody who's living in this town is going to be tanaka let's move on there's also a really funny story that i read and i can't remember where if anybody hears this video and they know where this story is please send me an email and tell me this is a great example of something i should have cited in my own bibliography and i didn't and that is a story of people going out into the countryside these officials going out in the countryside and being essentially at a loss for coming up with new names they used everything they could think of and so they just started looking around and assigning names uh based on whatever happened to pop into their field of vision like okay i'm going to give you the name colgate because there's colgate toothpaste sitting on the shelf that kind of thing it was a wild and wacky time in japanese history but the end upshot of it was that everybody ended up with a surname okay earlier i was mentioning biography biographical dictionaries there are a lot of biographical resources that help you find out who and what and what is who in east asia most of these are called in japanese ajin meiji ten i mentioned that word before when we were looking at o'neills those are biographical dictionaries you may not really name dictionaries but biographical dictionaries if you're a student here at suny albany i can tell you that we have a couple good biographical dictionaries in our library but i can also tell you that the minerva catalog system is lousy at finding them and my advice for you is simply go into minerva and as a search term type in gene made j-i-n-m-e-i all one word and you'll find what you're looking for any other search term it gives you a bunch of false hits it's really frustrating okay so there's a multi-volume biographical dictionary single volume biographical dictionaries i think i mentioned when we were looking at morohashi that murohashi can also be a good biographical resource because morohashi lists prominent people particularly people who are prominent in synology so if you can't find information about someone in a smaller jean meiji ten and you have access to morohashi that's another place that you could look and the great thing about morohashi is even though it is so daunting because it has so many examples in classical chinese if you are looking up the names let's say of a meiji period scholar that person will probably be in motohashi and the entry there will be in modern japanese it's not going to be in classical chinese so it it really is accessible now of course wikipedia can be a first stop and the internet can be a first stop you can google somebody's name this has made a tremendous difference in my life it makes finding information much quicker but i'll say even now in 2013 the english side of wikipedia about japanese people is often quite sparse or you'll find just a japanese page and not an english page depending how good your japanese is you may not want to slog through the japanese wikipedia page the one really great thing about the japanese wikipedia page though is that it will probably definitely will give you the reading of the person's name so every wikipedia entry for a person will give you their kanji and then in parentheses we'll tell you how to pronounce it and other web pages aren't necessarily going to do that for you so that's one reason why i can't just say oh you know don't depend on wikipedia all that said even the japanese entry on a person might be missing some useful information because as we know wikipedia is run largely by volunteers and if somebody just hasn't bothered to put that information in about a particular japanese person then it's just not going to be there okay so let me go back to what these g major 10 look like what what should you be looking for in a good g major 10 there are also online gene major 10 as you'll see here's what we might expect here's the entry from the online biographical dictionary and i've got a number of links on blackboard to biographical dictionaries so you can take a look at those first we are given the reading of the person's name fukuzawa yukichi and we're told that there's two different ways to write his name why because well he traditionally there's a couple different ways to approach this traditionally he liked to write it with the complex kanji as we see here and this is not the complex kanji but it is the queue kanazukai so one might find his name written this way yukichi or we might see fukuzawa yukichi could be either way and of course as i was saying this character and this character the same one just complex and simplified okay the next bit of information that we get are birth and death dates including the nengo if appropriate and in fukusa yukichi's case the nengo is appropriate he was born in the tokugawa period and so we're told he's born in 1835 which is temple here and then the date okay and then um it tells us that he died in 1901 and it also gives us here the nengo which was meiji 34. just a quick note about that birth date so it's tempo five yeah the year 1835 was tempo five uh and it was and that date is actually the lunar date it's the twelfth day of the twelfth month which is obviously not the same as the solar date of course you could convert that using nengo calc turns out that it's january 10th 1835. how would i know which is which well um you got to keep in mind that the japanese switched their calendar again in 1872 so we're looking at 1835 so if i see a ningo i'm going to assume that it's the lunar calendar okay the next bit of information that we get here is why the perm person is famous who is he what kind of a person you know why is he even in the biographical dictionary in his case he was a thinker of the japanese enlightenment it tells us and he was an educator and a critic the next bit of information that we get is all the names that he is known by remember those different names we were just talking about the child name so his child name is han his azana is she is written with these characters she they give us the reading right there his goal was sachi and then it also tells us that at some point he had the surname of nakamura now some people have multiple asana and multiple goal so if you're looking at an older entry maybe from 100 or 200 years earlier and you see that don't be too surprised okay so that's that information the next thing that we get is his birthplace and his lineage where was he born and to whom is he related and then we get important events in his life in chronological order what important things did he do what important things happened to him and that kind of thing and then if we continue on to the next page we're also given a bibliography of his major publications he was a very active scholar he published an awful lot this is not a comprehensive list there's a lot more that he produced and then we get a famous quotation from him about about learning next a distinction that was bestowed upon him as an uh like an award if somebody's received any sorts of awards political activities of his he was active here it tells us in the conquer korea debates and then a posthumous distinction his portrait was put on the 10 000 yen banknote in 1984 and we saw that when we were looking at um numbers in the last learning module okay so that's what we should expect from a typical entry in aji meiji ten it's very different than the kind of entry that we see in o'neill's japanese names we get a lot more detail right fukuzawa in o'neill's japanese names indicates that he is male and that he is historical and literary and that's about it okay finally i want to finish up with selected biographical resources in our particular library at suny albany we do have a nihonjin mejiten and we have a book called japanese names a comprehensive index by characters and readings we also have a few other g major 10 that we have a multiple volume g major 10 the one that i've listed here is a single volume one i think it's much easier to use so it's the one that i would recommend plus of course there are many online resources in blackboard under useful links you'll find four of these and these are all in japanese and to show you an example this is the first one that actually sometimes comes up with the wrong encoding if that happens remember the quick video sitting on blackboard about changing the encoding of your browser you'll have to go to uh view and then change the encoding like that if you don't remember okay this one's organized according to the goju onzo so we start up here on the right and the others are much of a muchness in that respect even though this one has a title in english it is really in japanese and it also is organized according to the goju onzu so those are also really useful resources and i'm going to ask you to use at least one of them for the homework assignment so that's our learning module on names and we'll move on to the next unit