Why I Took a Japanese Name

In Shakespeare’s most famous romantic tragedy, Juliet tells her lover Romeo, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” She obviously never had to fill out Japanese paperwork. As I lamented in one of my earlier articles, having a middle name in Japan complicates so many everyday tasks. Then there’s the issue of length. As my full English name has eighteen characters—twenty if you include spaces—there are some businesses that won’t have me as a customer because they can’t type my long name into their customer-tracking systems. After dealing with such aggravations for more than three years, I finally made the decision to take a Japanese name.(18 more paragraphs)