Ken Yoshida is my name, and I am the son of my Japanese dad, Tadashi Yoshida, and my Thai mom, Urarak Khemphet. However, I had a different name at birth. I was Nophadon Khemphet, because of my mom and being born in Thailand. Around my first birthday, my parents moved me to Canada and I remained legally as Nophadon Khemphet for some time.

Despite having that legal name as a child, I do not remember being called by my Thai name at home with family or at school with friends. Even my elementary school’s student directory listed me as “Ken” instead of “Nophadon.” My extended family both in Japan and Thailand also called me “Ken” or “Ken-chan” during our family visits. I legally became “Ken Yoshida” near the end of elementary school, and I luckily haven’t changed names since! Despite this three-letter first name being a constant in my life, its shortness hides an immigration story.

After legally changing my name, I asked my dad why he had chosen to name me Ken. My dad replied by recounting his story on how he immigrated to Canada in the early ’70s as a young man in his twenties. This was after the country lifted its race-based immigration policy in 1967, with the introduction of a points-based system that allowed for a more objective and open-door immigration policy. He was part of the second major wave of Japanese immigration to Canada after the country had effectively placed a near-complete ban on Japanese immigration in 1928.

I remember my dad recounting the difficulties he experienced as an immigrant, especially as he had decided to settle in the Eastern province of Ontario instead of the Pacific province of British Columbia, where many Japanese immigrants tend to settle in Canada. One difficulty he had was due to his name, Tadashi, as it was not a common name in Ontario then and even today. His non-Japanese friends had difficulty saying his name, and had given him the nickname of “Tadpole” (my father was born soon after the end of the Second World War and missed out on drinking lots of milk!). With this reality in mind, he told me he thought long on how to name his first son in his new country. 

My dad then told me how he wanted me to have a name that would work in Canada and in Japan so as to have an easier time in either country. Trying to find a name that fits in English and Japanese was very hard, compared to a linguistic crossover or equivalents between English and French, which is more common in Canada (i.e., Paul is the same in both, or William can be Guillaume).

He settled on “Ken,” as he had a non-Japanese friend in university in Canada with that name. He was very surprised when he met a Ken that wasn’t Japanese in Canada. My dad spoke highly of his friend Ken, who had sadly passed away young due to a brain tumor, but he had the opportunity to show his friend his hometown in Japan and major tourist sites in the country on a trip. While my dad was able to find me a name that would work both in Canada and in Japan, he also thought long on how to write it in Japanese.

Thankfully in English, there is only one alphabet in the writing system. The same cannot be said of Japanese, which has three alphabets with different purposes and are known as hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Hiragana is widely used to mark grammar, katakana is typically used to spell out “foreign” words, and kanji is used, among many uses, to write nouns. Traditional Japanese names would exclusively use either kanji or hiragana, and names with kanji would have a “deeper” meaning when translated to English (i.e., my last name Yoshida—吉田—translates into English as “lucky rice field”).

On top of thinking on how to write my name in Japanese, my dad also had to consider the fact that my name is usually a short form of Japanese male names like Kenji, Kenta, Kenichi, etc. He decided that my name in Japanese should be written in katakana as ケン.

His choice to write my name in katakana is again a reflection of his desire for me to have a name that would respect my future reality as someone with ties to Japan and Canada. Having my name written in katakana instead of hiragana or in kanji demonstrates that despite having a Japanese-sounding name, it hints at a connection to a foreign country, one that is not evident at first glance. If my name was written in hiragana as けん or in kanji as 健 (my personal choice if I were to write it in kanji), it would hide my connection to Canada because both alternatives would be purely “Japanese.”

My dad kept this same katakana practice with my younger brother’s name, Jun as ジュン, but had difficulty with trying to find a name for him that would work in English and in Japanese like mine. This is most evident in how his name was pronounced at home with family, with friends at school (pronounced as the month of “June”), or by teachers at school (pronounced as “Yun” by changing the “J” to “Y”).

While I was not fond of some of the elementary school teasing with my name (i.e. Barbie and Ken), and that I have yet not come across another Ken of my age in Canada (but know a few around my dad’s age), I am proud to have this three-letter name. It is befitting of my tightrope reality as a Japanese-Canadian and has a complex story stemming from my dad’s deep reflections that I am glad to share with this essay. Thank you, dad, for thinking hard to name me and choosing a wonderful name like “Ken” for me.

 

© 2024 Ken Yoshida