Who hasn't wondered at some point if they like their name? Do we really feel comfortable with this choice? What did our parents base their choice on?
My name is Manuel Roberto. I have two official names and one in Japanese that is not legally registered. In our country, two given names are generally chosen. My name is Manuel, like my father. I don't know how they chose Roberto, but one of my cousins was also called that. Thinking about it, I think they had a lot of difficulty finding suitable names. I see names in the family that have been repeated among cousins, uncles and other relatives, so they opted for the second one to use it in the privacy of the family.
At home there was a Manuel: my father, so they used Roberto to differentiate us, although they called him by his Japanese name: Seijo in the family environment, outside the home he was usually Manuel. My sisters and I had a Japanese name, although it was not registered on our birth certificate. My Japanese name is Mitsuo. Very few people know it, I had always hidden it from my friends, when they found out, for them I was the Perman #1.
All my contemporaries were regulars of a Japanese anime that was seen on television, it was about superheroes called: “Perman (パーマン Pāman)”, here in Peru it was called “El Hombre Par”, where the protagonists were two children, a girl, a baby and a monkey, who were recruited by a masked alien to fight for justice. The character they associated me with was Mitsuo Suwa (Perman #1).
My mother's name was Saturnina. Her name was a source of suffering for her, she was the butt of ridicule, and there was always someone who made a joke that embarrassed her. She preferred to be called by her Japanese name: Shizue. It was difficult for my parents to choose names for their children, but they chose well. Not like my mother, who was called Saturnina.
My aunts were: Lorenza, Yolanda, Zoila and my uncle Benjamin. She said that my parents had it difficult, but my grandparents and their children paid the consequences. For most immigrants, language was an obstacle, some with a nice name of a saint they chose from the calendar: if you were born on May 13, they called you Fatima, for the Virgin of Fatima; if you were born on July 16, they called you Carmen, for the Virgin of Carmen.
The problem came when they chose the name of a neighbor, as happened with my mother and my aunts, or perhaps the name of the midwife or a bed neighbor in the maternity ward. My aunt Lorenza changed her name and chose Elena. Although it is true that my father was saved with his name Manuel, what he could not avoid was that they registered him wrong. Surely my grandparents, not knowing Spanish well, the confusion of the name in Japanese (Seijo) added to the negligence of the municipal registrar, finally made them give my father: Manuel Oshiro Seijo, that is to say that Seijo appears as his mother's surname.
The topic of names only became important when I had my own children. There are many beliefs, such as that the choice of name can determine a person's future. I had heard of several children who had their Japanese name changed because they were sick. The new choice was in accordance with tradition, and after the change they led a normal life. This accentuated my desire to follow tradition and choose a good name. With my first daughter we agreed that my father would choose the Japanese name, we would choose the Western name, and we would present several options to my father-in-law, who was Japanese, from which he would choose the most auspicious one. We wanted to follow tradition.
The paternal name and surname are written in Japanese (in kanji, in one of the writing systems), and the number of strokes that result when writing it gives a number that can be decisive for the future of the person, so my father-in-law relied on the Takashima Ekidan calendar. My father based his choice on a Japanese singer called Mayumi. She liked the Enka genre and that's where it came from. One of the names we liked was Melissa, so it was Mayumi Melissa. In that order it sounded good to us. The funny thing was when my mother-in-law asked at the clinic which one we finally chose, she spoke more in Japanese or in Uchinaguchi, the language of Okinawa. When she found out, she said: Mayumi is pretty, but why did they choose that fish name: Mer…rusa, to which my wife replied that it was Melissa, not hake like fish. In the end it made us all laugh and it remained as an anecdote.
We named our second son Akio Alexis. For years I had thought that one should not name their children after an ancestor. Although my father was Manuel, I was Manuel Jr., my son would have to be Manuel Grandson. I believe that each person should create his own life story. By naming a child after an ancestor, you will be carrying their history as well, with all the good and bad, with which the odious comparisons will come, and that is not fair.
I did not count on my father's help in choosing my son's name, as he was not in very good health. He was just recovering and was depressed due to his illness, although he received the news of his grandson with great joy because it meant that his surname would be extended. I went to see my father every morning before going to work. He was not in a very good mood, while I was a little confused about choosing, I had a strange feeling that there were so many and yet so few options.
One of those mornings I picked up a newspaper, a Peru Shimpo, a daily publication aimed at our Nikkei community. In it you could see the outstanding people in our community, and suddenly I saw the news of two karatekas participating in events abroad, having won medals. One was Akio Tamashiro and the other was Alexis Carbajal Kina.
I saw them and thought Akio and Alexis were good names. I discussed it with my wife and she approved it, although I think all the options I had presented to her so far were so bad that she immediately accepted it. To this day, when my son is already 22, I tell him that the second option was Giacomo Yutaka, which I get a kind of bullying from everyone at home. No one really liked it. The chosen option was submitted for the respective analysis by my father-in-law. He approved it, so that's how it stayed.
After choosing the names for both children, a ceremony was held at home in which a red piece of paper was placed, on which the name was written in Japanese and Spanish script with the date of birth. This has been the experience we have had with regard to names, I think that, after all, it was a good choice because my mother's name was Saturnina, we had better luck.
© 2024 Roberto Oshiro
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