Kurosu proposed Take Ivy—a joke on the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s famed jazz piece “Take Five.” In Japanese, “Ivy” (aibii) and “Five” (faibu) sound vaguely similar, but the fluent English speaker Hasegawa countered that “Take Ivy” would make no sense to Americans. Like always, VAN employees ignored Hasegawa’s proper English corrections when they got in the way of artistic ambitions. To this day, Kurosu still proudly claims, “Someone who knows English never would have thought of that name!”
