A&S - On Japanese Female Names and the "Four-Kanji" Problem, Part I - Problem Statement, General Name Info, and Background

Women portraying a Japanese persona in the SCA get left out of half the fun of making a Japanese persona - the name.  Japan's traditional aristocratic naming conventions are, to put it mildly, completely bonkers, and the fact that female names have traditionally been almost an afterthought means that women don't get to play the game of "which kanji are you today?" that men get to play.  To give the most notorious example of women getting shafted on Japanese names, the "lady daimyo" Ii Naotora (井伊 直虎) (d. 1582) is known primarily by the third or so of her names - she was a child, then a nun, then finally a feudal lord, naming gets complicated as you'll soon see - and by a clearly masculine name that, to give you an idea of the fun that can be had here, can be read as "Lady Ii, the Straightforward Tiger."

 

Depicted - Lady Ii, a Straightforward Tiger, from "Meow Meow Japanese History," Ep. 55

In contrast to Ii Naotora, most aristocratic women receive a simple name based on virtues, plants, or natural features - Matsuko, for instance, just means Lady (-ko, at the time typically an aristocratic diminutive) Pine Tree (Matsu).  Sometimes, we do not even actually know the name of the woman, such as the much-earlier author of the Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, because Murasaki Shikibu is just "Lady Murasaki."  We have some guesses as to who she was, but despite her being one of the most prolific authors of the late Heian period and one of the prime sources for Classical Japanese dialogue, they are no more than guesses.

Meanwhile, the structure of a man's name is typically four kanji - thus the "four-kanji" problem.  There are exceptions; the name Minamoto, or rather Genji, is one kanji, as is Taira, the name of their nemeses.  However, by late period, family names are generally two kanji, and then the given name is typically two kanji.  One of these is typically inherited, the other variable, so that generations of a family may be, for instance, (x)nobu, Nobu(x), et cetera - to give an idea, in the generation where Oda Nobunaga was born, he had six brothers who used the "Nobu" kanji in the first place of their name, as did his father, Oda Nobuhide.  The pass-down kanji could be used to establish lineage, indicate adoption, or even bestow favor on a subordinate, and the choice of kanji at various points in life could indicate substantial life changes without ever changing the pronunciation of the name.  I'll discuss a famous case of this below, to show how character choice becomes a form of subtle wordplay.

The reason this is an SCA A&S problem is that it's a basic assumption of the Society that you are a member of the gentry, whatever that may imply for your time and place.  An average subject of the Tenno, male or female, does not go through the rigamarole of a "proper" name.  They just get to be Saburo, or Miyu, or whatever, and even their "family name," because their family isn't aristocracy, is just a convenient identifier, much like the West.  This is part of why so many Japanese family names today are Tanakamura names - they contain two of the combination of ta (or da), meaning "paddy," naka (or naga), meaning "within," or mura, meaning "village," because the urbanization of Japan was deliberately limited by laws similar to European serfdom up through the end of the Edo period.

This matters to me for a couple reasons.  First, because one of my great fears is mental decay, and Japanese is such a weird, foreign language to an English-speaker that I've been trying to learn it to help with that, and second, because I have a daughter who is moderately more interested in a Japanese persona than a European.  The weirdness of Japanese lends itself to the kinds of wordplay that English just doesn't do; even Chinese is more consistent in its use of characters than Japanese.  To give a rough example of why this is a fun game, imagine for a moment that in addition to Adam roughly meaning "Man," A also meant "Triangle," so that every time you write the name "Adam" you are subjecting your readers to a stealth "They Might Be Giants" reference, because your name is "Triangle Man."  Let's walk through a historical example so you can see what effects this might have in terms of ridiculous wordplay.

Takeda Katsuchiyo is the first son of Takeda Nobutora, daimyo of Kai province.  When he turns fifteen, he goes through a ritual called gempuku, marking his transition to manhood.  Because the Takeda are a very old family - they are in fact descended from one of the Minamoto, whose name indicates non-inheriting imperial origin - and because they are still militarily and politically powerful, his family receives the gift of permission to use a character from the shogun's name, in this case Ashikaga Yoshiharu (足利義晴) - specifically haru (晴), meaning clarity.  His adult name is Takeda Harunobu (武田晴信)... unless we're talking about the Imperial court, which, because he is a Minamoto descendant, he is Minamoto no Harunobu (源晴信, the の is "silent" in writing).  You can start to see, hopefully, where the name madness begins to take hold.  But we're not done yet!

Takeda Harunobu goes through a very successful adult career, becoming one of the most widely respected warlords of the late Sengoku period; they still celebrate him with a three-day festival today, and he's remembered not only for his skill in warfare but for his care for his people and his public-works projects.  Eventually he decides to "retire" - this is a typical thing, where you hold on to the power but give the title to your heir, who hopefully learns how to run the clan in the meantime.  He takes a dharma name, because he is now, theoretically anyway, a monk.  He does this by inverting his name - Harunobu - into Nobuharu.  So far, this is not too crazy; after all, we've already marked his transition from youth to manhood with a new name, a transition from worldly to spiritual seems appropriate, and dharma names are to this day an important component of Buddhist spiritual life.  Where Japanese really outdoes itself is that he also changes how it's written (in common Japanese it's still pronounced Nobuharu, but we're not there about why this matters yet).  "Nobu" can certainly be written 信, but, like most syllables used in traditional four-kanji names, it can also be written a variety of other ways.  The dharma name he is given is written with 玄, a character that in other contexts means "hidden depths" or "occult."  Thus, his dharma name is 武田 信玄 - but dharma names are pronounced in "Chinese" pronunciation, or, rather, what the Japanese approximation of Chinese pronunciation, as of about 1200, is... Takeda Shingen.  After he dies, with sufficient prestige, he receives a god name - though I freely admit I don't know Shingen's and I've already spent a long time using him as a demonstrator; this last point is mostly to illustrate that even after death, Japanese names get complicated.

Thus, his name is Takeda Shingen Minamoto no Harunobu.  Each syllable of his name could be written with a different set of characters, though some (Takeda and Minamoto) never will be, because they don't belong to him, they're family names, and one (no) isn't ever written, it's like the German "von."  To his face, he generally is addressed as Takeda or Harunobu (with appropriate honorific); how he is addressed under other circumstances depends on the circumstances.

Each character of the name, because kanji are Chinese characters, is both a sound and a meaning; thus "haru" can be more than one character, and while they are all pronounced "haru," the meaning changes subtly.  This doesn't matter out loud, but the fact that Takeda Harunobu's name goes from "sincere clarity" to "the depths of sincerity" or thereabouts, just by changing a character, gives some idea of the nature of the game.  My personal favorite example is that I'm willing to bet I can make a kanji phrase that means both "world-class palace" and "world's worst outhouse," though I'd need way better knowledge of kanji than I have, but to give an example of this, a quick Jisho search for "Yoshi" under names shows no fewer than nine individual kanji that can be used for that syllable as names, which can mean anything from "fancy" to "reed," and are pronounced completely differently than "yoshi" when used independently.

This is a lot of information at once, so I am going to break this off here, but next up we discuss the problems of writing Japanese - which syllabary do you use (hint: for this game, it's the one made of kanji)?