Name story 03

Why Japanese Brazilian children have two names

Two million people of Japanese descent live in Brazil, and for more than a century their families have been solving the same small problem: how to give a child a name that works in Portuguese out loud and in Japanese at home. The answers are more inventive than a compromise.

What the US record shows

1890srare in US records2020s

Yumi is absent from the published US record until the 1960s, when 56 girls appear. The 1970s sit slightly lower at 53, and every completed decade after that is larger than the one before it: 107 in the 1980s, 112 in the 1990s, 160 in the 2000s, 273 in the 2010s. So far this decade the count stands at 261. The record lists the name for girls only.

A ship, and a date Brazil still marks

On June 18, 1908, the Kasato Maru tied up at the port of Santos carrying 781 contracted emigrants, the first group sent from Japan to work Brazilian coffee. Japan's National Diet Library notes that in Brazil the day is still remembered as the day of Japanese immigration. What arrived on one ship is now, by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs count in 2022, roughly two million people of Japanese descent, the largest Japanese-descendant population anywhere outside Japan.

A history that large has to be carried in something small enough to say out loud. In this case it was carried in names.

The clerk who added a letter

Writing for Discover Nikkei, Satomi Takano Kitahara tells how a mother-in-law arrived in Brazil at six years old as Masako and walked out of the register office as Massako. A clerk had done the phonetics: in Portuguese a single s between vowels goes soft, so Masako would be read as Mazako. Two of them held the sound in place.

The name survived the crossing by changing its spelling, which is a fair description of what happened next to thousands of them.

Names built to be read twice

The next generation went further and chose names that work in two writing systems at once. Kitahara points out that many second-generation men, now past sixty, are named Jorge or Mario, because those names can also be written in kanji, as that account gives them: 譲二 and 真理雄. Marie and Maria did the same job for women.

Said aloud at school the name is Brazilian. Written at home it is Japanese. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is surrendered, which is a quietly brilliant piece of engineering to hand a six-year-old.

Henrique Toshio, Leonardo Kei

The habit that replaced it is simpler and just as deliberate: a Brazilian first name with a Japanese middle name. Kitahara's examples are Henrique Toshio and Leonardo Kei, and Kitahara chose the second for a son, combining a Japanese name with the name of a soccer player popular at the time.

Which of the two a person actually goes by is then settled case by case, by whoever is doing the calling. One child, two names, both real.

The traffic runs both ways

The same account describes Brazilian families with no Japanese ancestry choosing Japanese names, including a daughter named Ayumi after the singer Ayumi Hamasaki. A naming habit that began as a way to get a child through a register office is now something other people want.

In São Paulo, three women of Japanese descent, Maíra Kimura, Yumi Shimada and Fernanda Ueno, print Kimura, Shimada and Ueno on every label of the brewery they run together, and named it with japas, street slang for people of Japanese descent. Their own first names carry the same split the labels do. One of the founders told The Beer Connoisseur that because they are women and Japanese descendants in a world of white and male dominance, it matters more than ever to show that representation matters.

Sources

The immigration figures come from Japan's National Diet Library and from Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which counts about two million people of Japanese descent alongside 47,472 Japanese nationals. The naming practices and the family stories are from Satomi Takano Kitahara's account for Discover Nikkei, a project of the Japanese American National Museum. The US popularity figures come from Social Security records.

See Yumi's meaning and full popularity curve →See whether Yumi fits your family →