JAPANESE NAME ORDER IN THE WESTERN WORLD

I have often been asked why I chose to use the Western name order for Japanese names on my website, instead of the Japanese name order.

When Japanese names are written or spoken in Japanese, they are written with the surname first, and the given name second. This is the opposite of the standard in Western cultures, where the given name is always first. When writing Japanese names in Roman letters, I prefer to use the Western name order. The name is being brought into our culture, and I feel that if we are to apply Roman letters, we should also apply the Western name order. This order is standard in the culture for which I am writing. If I were writing in Japanese, for a Japanese audience, I would obviously use the Japanese name order.

It should be noted that I am not the only person to make this choice. When Japanese men and women move to Western countries, they almost exclusively adopt the Western name order when they write their names. Some more famous examples include Yoko Ono and Ichiro Suzuki. When most artists' works are distributed in English outside of Japan, they prefer the Western name order in English editions. A few examples include Shunji Iwai and Naoko Takeuchi.

Almost all English publications show Japanese names with Western ordering, with the exception of some publications about historical and literary figures, or in some books concerning historical Japanese activities. The names of contemporary persons, however, are usually written with the Western ordering. Publications which standardly use the Western name order are newspapers, movie credits, and books about contemporary Japanese cultural elements.