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December 1993 - An Akito by Any Other Name
When people think about their names, there are generally two schools of thought. 1)That they are something that is deeply personal that forms part of your individual sense of identity. 2)That they are a general label given to you by your parents that you can take, leave, or change, as is convenient. For the most part, I never gave much though to my name while I lived in Japan. I basically treated it like a title. People either called me by my family name, or by my family name with an honorific attached, and that was about as complicated as it got. My teachers called me by my family name. My friends, neighbors and classmates called me by my family name. Even my fellow compound dwellers called me by my family name. In fact, until I was 14, the only people who ever used my given name were my closest friends and my Mother. Even my sister called Oniichan (the 'cute' form of big brother) rather than use my given name. This worked out fine in Japan, and was considered to be a little more formal than usual, but otherwise not so far out of the ordinary as to be notable. However, it didn't work so well once we moved to the Midwest. First of all here was confusion over what exactly my name was. I introduced myself in the normal Japanese way; putting my family name before my given name, and ending in the 'San' honorific, as I had always done. Whereas my school records, not to mention any introductions that were given for me by other people, put my given name first and my family name last, with no honorific, as is normal in America. Naturally, this left a lot of people scratching their heads over which way round thing should be. Fortunately though, this generally blew over quite quickly, but it still left the issue of pronunciation. People knew what my name was, but they couldn't say it. Although I am not going to print my family name here, (both because I value what privacy my self and my family still have, and because I had to promise my company that I wouldn't print my full name in order to be allowed to continue with this blog) it is pretty easy to pronounce as Japanese names go. Unfortunately, it it turned out to be rather harder for most of my newfound neighbors in the Midwest to say. For which reason most people that I knew in the Midwest quickly gave up trying to pronounce it, and started to using my given name. Which is a bit shorter and easier to say with an American accent. Largely, this was OK. Though it did feet a little strange having people who I hardly knew call me by a name that was usually reserved for the people who knew me best. However, this too turned out to be a temporary arrangement, at least for some. If you stretch your memories back to the early 90s, you might just remember that the year that I arrived in America was also the year that a new television show named 'The X-Files' first aired. I didn't really watch it all that often, but a lot of my classmates did, and it took about five minutes for them to decide that I not only looked like the lead character, one Fox Mulder, but that I also acted like him too. As you might have expected, half of my school immediately decided that it was more interesting to call me Fox, than to use my given name or by my family name. Of course, things didn't end there. In a flash of genius that it rarely found in a Midwestern high school, somebody decided that, since I was Japanese, it might be funny to find out what the Japanese word for 'Fox' was, and to call me that instead. As of that day, and because of that unilateral gesture, I acquired the nickname 'Kitsune'. A name which not only became so well known that half of the town began calling me by it, but which also stuck to the point that people whom I knew then still call me by it today. Although, as anybody who speaks Japanese will know, Kitsune isn't exactly the most appropriate of nicknames for a Japanese schoolboy (its is more commonly applied to girls, in which case it means 'Vixen'), it was marginally better than having everybody mispronounce my name as Akeetoesaan, so I didn't object too strongly about being known by this moniker. On top of this, being known almost universally known as Kitsune also had one big advantage. It really annoyed my Mother. So it was allowed to stay. |
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