Japan has begun enforcing a law aimed at curbing the rise of unconventional and sometimes bewildering baby names – a move officials say will streamline administrative systems but which also reflects a growing tension between individual expression and traditional norms when it comes to naming.
Revisions to the Family Register Act, which came into effect on Monday, now limit the ways in which kanji – the Chinese characters used in written Japanese – can be read when registering a person’s name. The change is widely seen as an effort to clamp down on kirakira (literally “glittery”) names.
Parents first began opting for kirakira names in the late 1980s that have changed with trends in popular culture, according to academics.
Whereas school classrooms were once populated by boys named Taro or Hiroyasu and girls were called Yuko or Mariko, teachers today have to struggle with some outlandish readings of traditional Chinese characters.
The names “Jewel”, “Lovely”, “Kitty” and “Elsa” have all had their moments for girls, while boys have been registered with local governments as “Prince”, “Naruto” and even “Pikachu”. Others have been bestowed with “Purin”, which sounds like “pudding”, “Naiki”, which is close to US sports brand Nike and “Dorami”, a character from the Doraemon animated television series.
According to the government, the revisions to the act are designed to make digitalisation of administrative procedures more straightforward by standardising the pronunciation of kanji characters. The new law states that the way a character is pronounced must be “generally accepted as a reading”.
