Under much protest I attended Japanese-language school every Saturday starting from the time I was about six years of age to my high school years in Los Angeles County.
I’m part of Barack Obama’s largely unknown Jones generation, which bridges baby boomers and Generation X. I went to school with an unsightly head gear (what torture!) with clothing sewed by my mother from Simplicity patterns. It was a time in which made in Japan meant cheap transistor radios. It was not cool to be Japanese and speak Japanese.
Yet after a rigorous week of public school, I had to sit with others in another classroom on Saturday mornings, missing out on Saturday cartoons (yeah, that was a thing) and Friday night slumber parties. Among one of the first kanji we learned how to write were our names. Since most of us sans one boy was of Japanese ancestry, we all had kanji for at least our surnames. Our kanji for Hirahara is 平原, which literally means flat field. The kanji for hira 平 can also be read as hei as in heiwa, which means peace. Since both my parents are Hiroshima hibakusha, atomic-bomb survivors, I’ve always loved the symbolism for 平.
I’m also the first born; my immigrant mother had only been in America for about a year when I arrived. I was my mother’s only close blood relative in the US until my brother was born eight years after me. As a result, I was not given a middle name because that’s not a common practice in Japan. I was given kanji for my first name, Naomi 直美.
There’s a connection between my first name and my mother’s first name, Mayumi. Both names have mi 美,which also can be read as utsukushii, or beautiful. When my mother was born, my grandfather apparently was moved by the shape of her eyebrows. As a result, her kanji is 眉美, which literally means beautiful eyebrows. (Note: mayu in Mayumi can be written in different ways, thus changing its meaning. Also, some Japanese dispense with kanji and use hiragana or even katakana instead for their first name.)
Jump forward to my first translation deal with a Japanese publisher for a couple of my Mas Arai mysteries. I can’t remember if I was asked, but when the final copies arrived on my doorstep, I was surprised to see that my name on the cover and inside the book was written in katakana. To see my name written like that was a bit bewildering and disconcerting after all those years of Japanese school, carefully writing my name in kanji for decades. I brushed away my surprise for those two books (Gasa-gasa Girl and Snakeskin Shamisen) but when the final Mas Arai, Hiroshima Boy, was due to be published in Japan, I made the request of my publisher—can you write my name in kanji?
To my surprise, this was an issue. I was clearly a foreigner, a gaijin, literally an outside person. And gaijin always have their names written in katakana despite the possibility they may be a Nikkei who identified themselves with a name in kanji for most of their lives.
I have to give my Japanese publisher credit, because after some internal discussions that I was not privy to, the company adopted my kanji for the final Mas Arai mystery.
Later I was explaining this scenario to a friend, a Japanese journalist, and she expressed that it was wrong for me to push for the use of kanji. The use of katakana in one’s surname immediately identifies that I am a foreigner, and that the work is translated. (The name of the translator is also on the cover, so I maintain that there are some clues that I am a “gaijin.”) It’s confusing for the Japanese reader, she told me.
I get what she was saying, and in fact, in an excellent academic book, Redefining Japaneseness, written by Professor Jane H. Yamashiro, Nikkei professionals in Japan like Glen Fukushima confirm my friend’s perspective. The more fluent a Nikkei becomes in Japanese, the more likely they will adopt katakana for their name to communicate that they are not native Japanese. But I view business and commercial use different than for my purposes as a storyteller.
Sometimes I rejected my heritage, but I never abandoned my name. I had trekked the hill in a small town in Hiroshima Prefecture to reach the Hirahara gravesite with the kanji 平原 carved in headstones. I told people that my first name meant either honestly beautiful or beautifully honest, the latter an attribute I aspire to fully embrace.
I don’t know if my use of kanji for my name is problematic for Japanese readers or media outlets, but I’ve concluded that it’s okay. Yes, I’m an American, but that doesn’t mean I’m easily classifiable as an outsider. We outside of Japan had to fight with authority figures, peers, and even ourselves for our names, abundant with family stories. So in Japanese circles I claim 平原直美 as my name. Who knows, maybe I’ll start a trend.
© 2024 Naomi Hirahara
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