5h1njuu is occasionally political. Also, manga/ anime/ video game stuff. Book reviews here (pending) 注意：All questions will receive unsubstantiated opinions. こう見えても日本人ですよ♪
As we move into 2025, I know there are many users apprehensive of what this year will bring, not just in terms of single countries, movements, crises or wars, but just the future in general.
I hesitated on posting this. It is very much meant for me with no thought or understanding of how others live.
But then my town caught on fire and I decided "What the heck? You only live once."
Context:
I come from a rather large, sprawling diasporic family. My relatives live in many parts of the world, in at least 7 countries and across 3 continents.
I myself spend a lot of time volunteering within my own community as well as traveling to visit my family. Thus, I see the world from many different viewpoints.
I'm writing to tell you I think The World is Just OK.
This doesn't mean that the I think world feels or is safe for each person, rather that I think headlines projecting doom spirals and societal collapse are largely overblown - and they don't match objective fact.
If I compare their world to ours, many more of us are doing ok now relative to then, even as we may have similarly large existential concerns.
Models on trends in comparative sociology and history predict exponential technological development. Put another way, new technologies first slowly develop, then improve in efficacy really fast.
They also predict periodic cycles in decreasing magnitude for social change and development. Societies go through alternating periods of progress and stagnation, but the gains and losses become less extreme over time.
Maybe that's why I always found my grandparents easier to relate to compared with my own parents. I always felt our eras and perspectives were compatible: existing within similar patterns of social change.
My personal opinion is that luck accounts for how my family survived these eras of intense turmoil. I attribute what I can't ascribe to sheer luck to having all women be able to complete university going back three generations - which is still rare in much of the world.
However, I also attribute my families' tenacity to my grandparents perspectives and advice as well. I loved them for their compassion, wisdom, unusually forward-thinking values and above all, their resilience.
Below the cut is some of their (collective) advice. I hope their words encourage people to reach out to trusted elders who may provoke similar feelings of reassurance and resilience during troubled times. I have especially compiled this list for anyone who might not have similar elders to consult at present.
I hope you find these thoughts useful.*
Actual quotes are written in italics.
Survive: you can't see or affect where society will go if you aren't alive.
"If history is written by the winners, your goal must be to live just long enough be a winner."
If you don't want to survive - addressing that impluse is your most immediate concern and your main priority.
"No one who is healthy wants to die, so if you want to die, you must be unwell, so tell those you trust that you are unwell and get help."
Learn to differentiate between trust v. loyalty v. love: The people you trust are those with whom you feel safe. The people you are loyal to are those you will help and protect out of obligation. Love just is.
"You can be loyal to others, trust others and love others, but it is rare for a person to provoke all 3 feelings. Such people are your family. We are a loyal family, so we do not cut off many relatives, even when others would. You can still be loyal to someone [like a relative] even if you do not love of trust them, but you don't have to think of them as family."
(Context: I was asking how to let go the desire to be mean to relatives who were mean to me. My grandmother also said "There is no contradiction between giving someone a bed, a bath and meal but still sending them off happily the next day with no desire to see them again.")
Have purpose beyond just surviving: imagine what would make you happy because it is what you want to do - not because of the result. Build your life around having some time to do that.
"This is why women in my era got married. People are not meant to live alone, and it was easier to share the burdens of life with a person I trusted so I could have a little time to myself to do what I loved."
(My other grandmother on "Why picking a good husband matters")
Do your part: Be useful to other people in ways that help build community.
"People are less likely to target you when they owe you their life, and you fear them less once you've helped them."
Engage: Talk to your neighbors and acquaintances, even if they seemed unsafe or you disagree with them.
"Remember, only fundamentalists can't tolerate those they disagree with. For a society to be stable, we each must reject fundamentalism as much as possible."
Stay alert, seek peace: Always be ready to defend yourself, but trust in the goodness of each person as much you can.
"Don't be careless, but know that agitated people agitate each other. People who are calm and happy help release tension in an interaction. If you can't be calm, go meditate more. If you can't meditate, heal your mind until you can meditate."
Avoid isolation: Don't lock yourself in your own world. Even if it means greeting a neighbor in the street only once a day, participate in society
"Greet people politely so they know whose house you are from."
(The flipside was: "If you are impolite to the neighbors, they will think we raised you poorly, and we didn't, so don't do it!")
Avoid noise: Don't read the newspaper or listen to the radio if it makes you too sad. My grandparents didn't live to see social media + streaming, but I don't think they would approve.
And as my (academic) grandfather would say:
"If it is truly important, either a someone with a gun will threaten you in the street or someone will write a book about it one day for you to read. In tough times, your [mental health] is precious."
Health is a lifestyle:
"Enjoy your meals. Eat like an emperor in the morning, a king at noon and a beggar in the evening. Work your muscles hard, and match your sleep to the sun's movements. Take a bath at least once a day. Go for a short walk twice each day, even if just for 5 minutes. Consistency is more important than perfection."
Laugh when you can, cry when you should, and the next time you can laugh, laugh twice as much. And when you cry or laugh, do so with someone you love.
"Life is cruel. It is also beautiful. We were not built to endure life alone. You must regularly release your stress with others in a healthy manner to face these facts."
*Notes:
Please feel free to add your own beloved elder advice (Via reblog)
Comments may go either in replies or reblogs
However, behave in the comments and tags. As previously stated: The above is heavily YMMV.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Hippie church moms donating quinoa chips to my local food bank have done more for me materially than any internet idealist ever has.
People get pissed at me for being a pragmatist in my political ideals but I’ve been in the position where I was out of food right now.
And who helped me with that? Not people calling for some nebulous revolution. Not people telling me that the system was useless. Not people preaching at me to grow my own food. It was a church food bank partially funded by the state of Texas that some southern hippies donated a bunch of Whole Foods nonsense to.
And you know what? I’m sick and tired of defeatism. What can we get done right now, huh? Are you gonna accept something a bit better to help people right now or are you waiting for your perfect utopia to come to you?
Yeah, UBI is better than the quinoa chips. Sure. But right now the quinoa chips are stopping people from going hungry and if all we can do is get the food bank quinoa chips to more people, then I say so be it. That’s something. I’ll almost always take baby steps over nothing.
why is it always a male character going mad avenging his dead wife and never a female character cradling her dying pure of heart husband in her arms then dragging the whole world down with her
Emperor Mage by Tamora Pierce. It’s an honorable mention because he’s not actually dead, but the dude spends a shitload of effort faking his death to sidestep the titular bad guy but neglects to let his girlfriend in on the con, so she loses it a bit and raises a pack of undead dinosaur skeletons and mummified mammoths and such from the Imperial Natural History Museum and rampages the emperor’s palace into very expensive rubble by way of revenge.
As you do.
And then gifts the ruins of said palace to the city’s rats to pay for the necromancy.
I have a nonbinary Japanese character and I want to give them a gender neutral Japanese name, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable name websites for poc. Do you have any suggestions?
Name for Nonbinary Japanese CharacterJapanese followers (and Japanese followers only), do you have any suggestions? –mod Jess
@writingwithcolor Japanese person here. This is a long one.
Japanese names vary a lot in meaning and pronunciation depending on the Chinese character(s) chosen and whether pronunciation of the character is using the kunyomi (i.e. the Japanese version of the word) or the onyomi (an approximation of a Chinese word that depends both on the Chinese version of the word and the time period when the word was imported).
I caution against naming a Japanese character yourself unless one of the following apply:
You are close to native level fluency in terms of your understanding of the language and have a good background in the history of kanji
You are able to get ahold of a Japanese person who can tell you if the name makes sense
You are pulling names from existing Japanese people (historical preferred) that make sense for the context of the character’s time and place (Lots of these names are quite modern and wouldn’t make sense for people pre-Meiji, or even pre-Taisho).
As a Japanese speaker who reads English media, the most common giveaway to me that the author didn’t consult a Japanese person or simply neglected to do research is the name they assign to their Japanese character. This happens way more often than you would think. If you send me the name of a Japanese character from an English language tv series, comic book series or novel, I will happily tell you if the author got it wrong.
I strongly advise against using anime characters as the basis for your naming because creators love to exploit terrible puns/ the “It just sounded cool” factor/ “I’m going to name my character after food that I like.” Hardly anyone IRL would give these names to children, and there have been cases of the government stepping in to prevent parents from giving their child a name the government feels will put the child at a disadvantage.
In other instances, if a creator has assigned a character a particular name that is not typical for their gender, they are doing so to say something about that character (ex. They are a tomboy, a feminine man, they have a tragic backstory, etc.) that nevertheless adheres to a gender binary, not because the name is actually unisex IRL.
I took a quick peek at the suggestions thus far, and I have some comments. I’ll update as necessary.
NOT a given name that actually exists:
Ame
Midoriya <- This could be a last name, but not a first name.
Shiro <- This is a last name.
A name that probably only exists in anime and pop culture (ex. Idols):
Tsubasa (Ex. Tsubasa Imai of the idol group Tackey and Tsubasa)
Think of it like naming your kid Beyoncé. No judgment, but the average individual is going to assume that you are preparing your kid for a life in the entertainment industry or that you named them after someone in the entertainment industry.
An actual unisex name:
Yuki (Skews female, but if a shortened version of, say, Yukio or Yukihiro, could also apply for a male)
Not a unisex name/ Gender may differ depending on the characters:
Hikaru (Skews male. Girls tend to be named Hikari)
Akira (Skews male)
Hinata (Skews female)
Yū (Likely skews male if 勇, likely skews female if 優)
Tōru (Male. In Fruit’s Basket, it is mentioned that the mother names her daughter Tōru in spite of this, not because it is a unisex name).
Akiko (A name ending in “ko” is automatically feminine)
Kyōko (See Akiko)
Natsu (Female)
Ren (Skews female)
Misaki (Female, not to be confused with Masaki, which is male)
Shirō (Male, usually a component of the full given name)
Below is an edited list of actual Japanese names that most Japanese people consider unisex (I recommend against wikipedia articles. They are mostly wrong.). The suggestion to use https://www.behindthename.com/ is a good one. They are correct in most cases excluding more subtle nuances and for instances where they fail to account for names that are homonyms (Of course, many modern gender neutral Japanese names are homonyms of existing older non-gender neutral Japanese name, so you’ll miss out on that):
Asahi
Asuka
Haru
Hiromi
Homare
Izumi
Ibuki
Kaoru
Kei
Kiyo
Kizuna
Kuni
Jun
Makoto
Masami
Mirai
Mizuki
Mutsuki
Nagisa
Nao
Naomi
Rin
Satsuki
Shinobu
Shion
Subaru
Tamaki
Tomo (See Yuki)
Tsukasa
An important thing to keep in mind is that the gender binary is a big deal in Japanese society. While we have a couple gender neutral pronouns, many aspects of the language from names to grammar structure to acceptable vocabulary are heavily codified by this gender binary. As Japanese society “modernizes”, for lack of a better word, it’s becoming more common to choose kanji characters and pronunciations for children that are gender neutral both in meaning and connotation. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the person will be perceived by a Japanese audience as being either masculine or feminine depending on their perceived gender.
It is exceedingly difficult to be a nonbinary individual in Japan. Our culture and social norms force most people to choose to be male or female. More important to your character than their name is the meaning assigned to the kanji. Do the kanji reflect particularly masculine or feminine qualities? How does the character feel about those meanings? How does the character handle being non-binary in a culture that makes your life very difficult simply for being non-binary? I think these are much more important things to consider beyond the name.
(edited lots)
ETA 1: Dear me, so many people in the comments citing anime as their source. I direct you to my discussion on why not to use anime/ manga character names.
I’m not with WWC anymore, but they’ve created an incredible online repository here on tumblr and on their website - seems a shame to waste it.
Most LLM AI used in English-speaking parts of the world aggregate results from the English-speaking parts of the web with highest traffic.
These results produced by majority-English speakers and low JPN cultural competency are thus as accurate and well-researched as many of the old comments in this post.
There’s stuff AI is great for. I experiment with SLM and LLM AI a good deal myself, but I’d argue AI is a poor substitute for research in writing.
Remember: Using LLM AI for researcg is the same as a search engine presenting an aggregate of your search query as fact - but the aggregate of your search results is never actually fact.
In fact, I’d argue LLM AI for names often simply spits out most of what wikipedia says, but many writers already know wikipedia is a poor source for culturally competent naming.
People often say AI results for the SocSci topics we use for writing research possess an accuracy of 85%. That is too low for successful world-building and reader immersion.
Especially if you write for an audience - consider the following:
The poor quality of AI-generated writing suggestions is equally obvious in rapid-release JPN popular media, like light novels (Including related anime + manga/ webtoons). Any English speaker involved in JPN fandoms notices when JPN series in quasi-Western settings have characters with names that make no sense or just feel incredibly cringe.
The domestic JPN audience might not notice, but the rest of us do, right?
Many domestic JPN pop culture/ fandom writers use the same shortcuts as their Western counterparts (Including misusing AI for writing research). Still doesn’t make the end product good.
I recently played through a bunch of very popular otome games set in Not!USA! and had intense secondhand embarrassment + poor immersion over naming choices.
Do what you want. However, if you can’t bother to do basic research for your character names, know that bilingual readers in your audience (like me) are always taking note of who obviously puts in the effort, and who doesn’t.
>What should someone keep in mind in naming a nonbinary Japanese character? Give examples of names that I could use that would be acceptable to a Japanese audience. Consult Japanese sources primarily.
ChatGPT’s answer is very similar to yours, with many of the same examples.
In full transparency, I’m reblogging to preserve our comments because I think this is good public dialogue and commentary. I’m not calling you out or anything. Hope that’s clear.
To your first point: This does not surprise me. The number of times I’ve tested ChatGPT against asks I’ve done for WWC as well as higher traffic posts for WWC convinces me that WWC has the necessary web visibility to be included as part of what ChatGPT scrapes off the web in its aggregations.
This makes sense.
The WWC mods run a high-traffic writer’s blog - and cursory web searches will uncover folks who’ve reblogged their posts, cross-linking, etc. They fill a gap left by other writer blogs and larger databases like wikipedia.
Here are my issues with ChatGPT for naming research:
ChatGPT does not cite in detail for the results when it aggregates stuff. Folks like WWC mods who may have been cited aren’t getting credit for their work. The user thus lacks full context on how the information was generated. Writer Research 101 is knowing the chain of information that allows us to decide narrative decisions. LLM AI like ChatGPT obfuscate this process in exchange for a streamlined UI.
85% isn’t a bad hit rate from a stats standpoint, as your results show - but that doesn’t help as far as niche topics that can’t be easily found online (I recently tried to use ChatGPT to look into Heian era waka poetesses. It didn’t work.)
Before blogs like WWC, JPN naming by non-JPN authors used to be a niche topic (See point 2) - and how JPN writers currently use JPN side LLM AI show this risk. Their results suck because there is no equivalent level of online data in Japanese on writing in Western settings for the AI to aggregate. We will never know without active, individual research the state and level of access of online info that LLM AI possess, so to treat them as a useful research tool makes no sense to me. The kind of person who knows enough about these topics likely doesn’t even need AI to find the info they want and would be wasting server time/ water/ power.
Put another way: What if data from places like WWC didn’t exist for ChatGPT to scrape?
ChatGPT would simply pull from the next set of high-traffic, reasonable accuracy results - but that still doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of info the way traditional methods do. Consulting sources like actual people (WWC) or standard, specialized references (eg. the website behindthename) come with lower resource usage rates and a higher chance of accuracy.
Back at WWC, I always stated I didn’t care what a person writes or how they write if I never hear about it or see it, because it doesn’t affect me.
To me, writing is a social activity as soon as it is shared.
Thus, my advice is always for folks who want others to read their work. To me, there’s little point isolating oneself from others by substituting the convenience of AI data aggregation for the actual connection of interfacing with the human-generated primary sources and verbal dialogue with people from the culture we want to portray.
Names are the first point of dissonance I notice as a reader. I also have a good eye for pattern - and it’s easy to spot when writers are pulling from a very narrow list as above rather than doing their own work.
A comparison I might make re: writing research is a traditional Japanese car navigation system versus google maps.
Most cabs in Japan still use the former which relies on a mix of satellite data + city roadmaps provided by local governments (including depth, landmarks and transit points)+real-time data from sensors and traffic cams. Allows for detailed selections optimized for rider cost, speed and convenience.
Google Maps: Aggregation of cellphone data from location + google satellite data. Cannot account for depth, recent updates to city infrastructure. Predicts flow over the whole system, but bad at generating precise results for individual preferences.
I rarely like writing produced by folks who take shortcuts. A lot of writing I see where the writer has used AI for key parts of research either shows many obvious signs of research shortcuts that make for boring writing - unless the person knew enough to not need AI for research to begin with.
But honestly, how many of us can that that we know that much?
First, there’s absolutely no bad blood between us. I’m surprised you’re even still on the site – I was just responding to a post from nearly seven years ago. Hostility is kind of the norm on social media, unfortunately, but there is none between us. If anyone says that there is then I will crush them.
Second, ChatGPT did actually cite its sources here as it often does. Typically those citations are preserved when I copy/paste over to tumblr, but I guess that didn’t happen this time. Here are the sources it cited: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
I can respect your dislike of artistic shortcuts. It’s a common theme in both the characterisation and the production of a lot of anime I really admire, *but*,
personally speaking, my work focuses a lot more on breadth than depth. I do have Japanese OCs, but I also have Khmer, Pashtun, New Guinean, Samoan, Kazakh, Afro-Surinamese, Congolese, and characters of other similarly niche backgrounds, who are harder to find information on than even Japanese. So I don’t feel bad about using ChatGPT to name those characters, and putting my substantial research efforts elsewhere. Doing that helps me create complex projects and timelines and give the world a background so that I can spend my time on developing the aspects that are far more important to me.
Growing up with Anglo/-American characters named stuff like Pegasus J. Crawford, Beyond Birthday, and Eliza Shimizu, that kind of stuff isn’t a strong expectation for me at all and has never negatively impacted my enjoyment of a work. I think it’s funny, and I will rue the day that Japanese people start using ChatGPT to get viable human names for their western characters, but I also think it’s maybe better if I don’t take that route for characters from like, Papua New Guinea.
Research isn’t bad if that’s how you do things, but asking an AI is also a completely viable route.
One of the recurring things I talk about on here is things that AI is really good at. It’s like a primary subject matter of my blog. I encourage people to use AI and exchange tips on how to do it effectively. So, I was less responding to you directly, and more putting that information in the context of my blog generally.
笑笑 You're good. That's a general diclaimer I put out when I do ridiculous things like respond to super old posts because I find it helps set tone quickly.
I'm with you on most of this, and your perspective on LLM AI in terms of being a tool for breadth is one I see echoed by most software engineer folks I know. ln fact, I suspect our views on most types of AI usage are probably in agreement. I wish these views were echoed more on social media sites like tumblr with lots of creatives both for the nuance and for the basic understanding of different forms of AI they require.
On my end, I still always want to see depth and intentionality over convenience and speed when it comes to cultural exchange.
After all, the original post and the original answer I provided were meant for a blog specifically on helping people from different backgrounds discuss how to effectively craft characters that translate to a broad audience.
The query was not: How do I most quickly name my nb Japanese character?
The query was: How do I find reliable, accurate nb JPN name sources on the internet for my character?
In other words, the query itself was a research question. In that context, my disagreement stems from the suggestion of a non-research-validated source, and my comments above reflects that reasoning.
Separately, I also agree that we are talking about a more fundamental disagreement in terms of the role of research in creation:
To me, the internet and world in general are rich and interconnected. However, I find many attempts at storytelling with cultural exchange that avoid interfacing with actual people or the cultures themselves lack potency. Poor research/ Research shortcuts are a common variable. Data aggregation, when it comes to human society, not only prevents this interaction I view as essential, but is also not very different from stereotyping or confirmation bias: moderately accurate, but rarely useful in consistently producing stuff many can enjoy.
I'm not arguing that character creation has to be done in certain ways or it's no good/ invalid. I'm not arguing usage of AI in creation should be subject to scorn, either. These concepts are subjective to the individual.
I'm simply at a stage in my life where I know what captures my interest - and the usage of AI in most creation around cultural exchange, especially for characters and stories originating from my cultural backgrounds, in my experience, has reliably not sparked any interest within me.
The reality that any methodology of creative pursuits will invite criticism, unsolicited feedback or commentary when brought into public view.
If your aim is to highlight high-utility applications of AI, consider me merely a single example of someone who might mostly agree with you, but disagrees with your assessment that this particular application of AI is one of high-utility.
I have a nonbinary Japanese character and I want to give them a gender neutral Japanese name, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable name websites for poc. Do you have any suggestions?
Name for Nonbinary Japanese CharacterJapanese followers (and Japanese followers only), do you have any suggestions? –mod Jess
@writingwithcolor Japanese person here. This is a long one.
Japanese names vary a lot in meaning and pronunciation depending on the Chinese character(s) chosen and whether pronunciation of the character is using the kunyomi (i.e. the Japanese version of the word) or the onyomi (an approximation of a Chinese word that depends both on the Chinese version of the word and the time period when the word was imported).
I caution against naming a Japanese character yourself unless one of the following apply:
You are close to native level fluency in terms of your understanding of the language and have a good background in the history of kanji
You are able to get ahold of a Japanese person who can tell you if the name makes sense
You are pulling names from existing Japanese people (historical preferred) that make sense for the context of the character’s time and place (Lots of these names are quite modern and wouldn’t make sense for people pre-Meiji, or even pre-Taisho).
As a Japanese speaker who reads English media, the most common giveaway to me that the author didn’t consult a Japanese person or simply neglected to do research is the name they assign to their Japanese character. This happens way more often than you would think. If you send me the name of a Japanese character from an English language tv series, comic book series or novel, I will happily tell you if the author got it wrong.
I strongly advise against using anime characters as the basis for your naming because creators love to exploit terrible puns/ the “It just sounded cool” factor/ “I’m going to name my character after food that I like.” Hardly anyone IRL would give these names to children, and there have been cases of the government stepping in to prevent parents from giving their child a name the government feels will put the child at a disadvantage.
In other instances, if a creator has assigned a character a particular name that is not typical for their gender, they are doing so to say something about that character (ex. They are a tomboy, a feminine man, they have a tragic backstory, etc.) that nevertheless adheres to a gender binary, not because the name is actually unisex IRL.
I took a quick peek at the suggestions thus far, and I have some comments. I’ll update as necessary.
NOT a given name that actually exists:
Ame
Midoriya <- This could be a last name, but not a first name.
Shiro <- This is a last name.
A name that probably only exists in anime and pop culture (ex. Idols):
Tsubasa (Ex. Tsubasa Imai of the idol group Tackey and Tsubasa)
Think of it like naming your kid Beyoncé. No judgment, but the average individual is going to assume that you are preparing your kid for a life in the entertainment industry or that you named them after someone in the entertainment industry.
An actual unisex name:
Yuki (Skews female, but if a shortened version of, say, Yukio or Yukihiro, could also apply for a male)
Not a unisex name/ Gender may differ depending on the characters:
Hikaru (Skews male. Girls tend to be named Hikari)
Akira (Skews male)
Hinata (Skews female)
Yū (Likely skews male if 勇, likely skews female if 優)
Tōru (Male. In Fruit’s Basket, it is mentioned that the mother names her daughter Tōru in spite of this, not because it is a unisex name).
Akiko (A name ending in “ko” is automatically feminine)
Kyōko (See Akiko)
Natsu (Female)
Ren (Skews female)
Misaki (Female, not to be confused with Masaki, which is male)
Shirō (Male, usually a component of the full given name)
Below is an edited list of actual Japanese names that most Japanese people consider unisex (I recommend against wikipedia articles. They are mostly wrong.). The suggestion to use https://www.behindthename.com/ is a good one. They are correct in most cases excluding more subtle nuances and for instances where they fail to account for names that are homonyms (Of course, many modern gender neutral Japanese names are homonyms of existing older non-gender neutral Japanese name, so you’ll miss out on that):
Asahi
Asuka
Haru
Hiromi
Homare
Izumi
Ibuki
Kaoru
Kei
Kiyo
Kizuna
Kuni
Jun
Makoto
Masami
Mirai
Mizuki
Mutsuki
Nagisa
Nao
Naomi
Rin
Satsuki
Shinobu
Shion
Subaru
Tamaki
Tomo (See Yuki)
Tsukasa
An important thing to keep in mind is that the gender binary is a big deal in Japanese society. While we have a couple gender neutral pronouns, many aspects of the language from names to grammar structure to acceptable vocabulary are heavily codified by this gender binary. As Japanese society “modernizes”, for lack of a better word, it’s becoming more common to choose kanji characters and pronunciations for children that are gender neutral both in meaning and connotation. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the person will be perceived by a Japanese audience as being either masculine or feminine depending on their perceived gender.
It is exceedingly difficult to be a nonbinary individual in Japan. Our culture and social norms force most people to choose to be male or female. More important to your character than their name is the meaning assigned to the kanji. Do the kanji reflect particularly masculine or feminine qualities? How does the character feel about those meanings? How does the character handle being non-binary in a culture that makes your life very difficult simply for being non-binary? I think these are much more important things to consider beyond the name.
(edited lots)
ETA 1: Dear me, so many people in the comments citing anime as their source. I direct you to my discussion on why not to use anime/ manga character names.
I’m not with WWC anymore, but they’ve created an incredible online repository here on tumblr and on their website - seems a shame to waste it.
Most LLM AI used in English-speaking parts of the world aggregate results from the English-speaking parts of the web with highest traffic.
These results produced by majority-English speakers and low JPN cultural competency are thus as accurate and well-researched as many of the old comments in this post.
There’s stuff AI is great for. I experiment with SLM and LLM AI a good deal myself, but I’d argue AI is a poor substitute for research in writing.
Remember: Using LLM AI for researcg is the same as a search engine presenting an aggregate of your search query as fact - but the aggregate of your search results is never actually fact.
In fact, I’d argue LLM AI for names often simply spits out most of what wikipedia says, but many writers already know wikipedia is a poor source for culturally competent naming.
People often say AI results for the SocSci topics we use for writing research possess an accuracy of 85%. That is too low for successful world-building and reader immersion.
Especially if you write for an audience - consider the following:
The poor quality of AI-generated writing suggestions is equally obvious in rapid-release JPN popular media, like light novels (Including related anime + manga/ webtoons). Any English speaker involved in JPN fandoms notices when JPN series in quasi-Western settings have characters with names that make no sense or just feel incredibly cringe.
The domestic JPN audience might not notice, but the rest of us do, right?
Many domestic JPN pop culture/ fandom writers use the same shortcuts as their Western counterparts (Including misusing AI for writing research). Still doesn’t make the end product good.
I recently played through a bunch of very popular otome games set in Not!USA! and had intense secondhand embarrassment + poor immersion over naming choices.
Do what you want. However, if you can’t bother to do basic research for your character names, know that bilingual readers in your audience (like me) are always taking note of who obviously puts in the effort, and who doesn’t.
>What should someone keep in mind in naming a nonbinary Japanese character? Give examples of names that I could use that would be acceptable to a Japanese audience. Consult Japanese sources primarily.
ChatGPT’s answer is very similar to yours, with many of the same examples.
In full transparency, I'm reblogging to preserve our comments because I think this is good public dialogue and commentary. I'm not calling you out or anything. Hope that's clear.
To your first point: This does not surprise me. The number of times I've tested ChatGPT against asks I've done for WWC as well as higher traffic posts for WWC convinces me that WWC has the necessary web visibility to be included as part of what ChatGPT scrapes off the web in its aggregations.
This makes sense.
The WWC mods run a high-traffic writer's blog - and cursory web searches will uncover folks who've reblogged their posts, cross-linking, etc. They fill a gap left by other writer blogs and larger databases like wikipedia.
Here are my issues with ChatGPT for naming research:
ChatGPT does not cite in detail for the results when it aggregates stuff. Folks like WWC mods who may have been cited aren't getting credit for their work. The user thus lacks full context on how the information was generated. Writer Research 101 is knowing the chain of information that allows us to decide narrative decisions. LLM AI like ChatGPT obfuscate this process in exchange for a streamlined UI.
85% isn't a bad hit rate from a stats standpoint, as your results show - but that doesn't help as far as niche topics that can't be easily found online (I recently tried to use ChatGPT to look into Heian era waka poetesses. It didn't work.)
Before blogs like WWC, JPN naming by non-JPN authors used to be a niche topic (See point 2) - and how JPN writers currently use JPN side LLM AI show this risk. Their results suck because there is no equivalent level of online data in Japanese on writing in Western settings for the AI to aggregate. We will never know without active, individual research the state and level of access of online info that LLM AI possess, so to treat them as a useful research tool makes no sense to me. The kind of person who knows enough about these topics likely doesn't even need AI to find the info they want and would be wasting server time/ water/ power.
Put another way: What if data from places like WWC didn't exist for ChatGPT to scrape?
ChatGPT would simply pull from the next set of high-traffic, reasonable accuracy results - but that still doesn't guarantee the accuracy of info the way traditional methods do. Consulting sources like actual people (WWC) or standard, specialized references (eg. the website behindthename) come with lower resource usage rates and a higher chance of accuracy.
Back at WWC, I always stated I didn't care what a person writes or how they write if I never hear about it or see it, because it doesn't affect me.
To me, writing is a social activity as soon as it is shared.
Thus, my advice is always for folks who want others to read their work. To me, there's little point isolating oneself from others by substituting the convenience of AI data aggregation for the actual connection of interfacing with the human-generated primary sources and verbal dialogue with people from the culture we want to portray.
Names are the first point of dissonance I notice as a reader. I also have a good eye for pattern - and it's easy to spot when writers are pulling from a very narrow list as above rather than doing their own work.
A comparison I might make re: writing research is a traditional Japanese car navigation system versus google maps.
Most cabs in Japan still use the former which relies on a mix of satellite data + city roadmaps provided by local governments (including depth, landmarks and transit points)+real-time data from sensors and traffic cams. Allows for detailed selections optimized for rider cost, speed and convenience.
Google Maps: Aggregation of cellphone data from location + google satellite data. Cannot account for depth, recent updates to city infrastructure. Predicts flow over the whole system, but bad at generating precise results for individual preferences.
I rarely like writing produced by folks who take shortcuts. A lot of writing I see where the writer has used AI for key parts of research either shows many obvious signs of research shortcuts that make for boring writing - unless the person knew enough to not need AI for research to begin with.
But honestly, how many of us can that that we know that much?
I have a nonbinary Japanese character and I want to give them a gender neutral Japanese name, but I'm having a hard time finding reliable name websites for poc. Do you have any suggestions?
Name for Nonbinary Japanese CharacterJapanese followers (and Japanese followers only), do you have any suggestions? –mod Jess
@writingwithcolor Japanese person here. This is a long one.
Japanese names vary a lot in meaning and pronunciation depending on the Chinese character(s) chosen and whether pronunciation of the character is using the kunyomi (i.e. the Japanese version of the word) or the onyomi (an approximation of a Chinese word that depends both on the Chinese version of the word and the time period when the word was imported).
I caution against naming a Japanese character yourself unless one of the following apply:
You are close to native level fluency in terms of your understanding of the language and have a good background in the history of kanji
You are able to get ahold of a Japanese person who can tell you if the name makes sense
You are pulling names from existing Japanese people (historical preferred) that make sense for the context of the character’s time and place (Lots of these names are quite modern and wouldn’t make sense for people pre-Meiji, or even pre-Taisho).
As a Japanese speaker who reads English media, the most common giveaway to me that the author didn’t consult a Japanese person or simply neglected to do research is the name they assign to their Japanese character. This happens way more often than you would think. If you send me the name of a Japanese character from an English language tv series, comic book series or novel, I will happily tell you if the author got it wrong.
I strongly advise against using anime characters as the basis for your naming because creators love to exploit terrible puns/ the “It just sounded cool” factor/ “I’m going to name my character after food that I like.” Hardly anyone IRL would give these names to children, and there have been cases of the government stepping in to prevent parents from giving their child a name the government feels will put the child at a disadvantage.
In other instances, if a creator has assigned a character a particular name that is not typical for their gender, they are doing so to say something about that character (ex. They are a tomboy, a feminine man, they have a tragic backstory, etc.) that nevertheless adheres to a gender binary, not because the name is actually unisex IRL.
I took a quick peek at the suggestions thus far, and I have some comments. I’ll update as necessary.
NOT a given name that actually exists:
Ame
Midoriya <- This could be a last name, but not a first name.
Shiro <- This is a last name.
A name that probably only exists in anime and pop culture (ex. Idols):
Tsubasa (Ex. Tsubasa Imai of the idol group Tackey and Tsubasa)
Think of it like naming your kid Beyoncé. No judgment, but the average individual is going to assume that you are preparing your kid for a life in the entertainment industry or that you named them after someone in the entertainment industry.
An actual unisex name:
Yuki (Skews female, but if a shortened version of, say, Yukio or Yukihiro, could also apply for a male)
Not a unisex name/ Gender may differ depending on the characters:
Hikaru (Skews male. Girls tend to be named Hikari)
Akira (Skews male)
Hinata (Skews female)
Yū (Likely skews male if 勇, likely skews female if 優)
Tōru (Male. In Fruit’s Basket, it is mentioned that the mother names her daughter Tōru in spite of this, not because it is a unisex name).
Akiko (A name ending in “ko” is automatically feminine)
Kyōko (See Akiko)
Natsu (Female)
Ren (Skews female)
Misaki (Female, not to be confused with Masaki, which is male)
Shirō (Male, usually a component of the full given name)
Below is an edited list of actual Japanese names that most Japanese people consider unisex (I recommend against wikipedia articles. They are mostly wrong.). The suggestion to use https://www.behindthename.com/ is a good one. They are correct in most cases excluding more subtle nuances and for instances where they fail to account for names that are homonyms (Of course, many modern gender neutral Japanese names are homonyms of existing older non-gender neutral Japanese name, so you’ll miss out on that):
Asahi
Asuka
Haru
Hiromi
Homare
Izumi
Ibuki
Kaoru
Kei
Kiyo
Kizuna
Kuni
Jun
Makoto
Masami
Mirai
Mizuki
Mutsuki
Nagisa
Nao
Naomi
Rin
Satsuki
Shinobu
Shion
Subaru
Tamaki
Tomo (See Yuki)
Tsukasa
An important thing to keep in mind is that the gender binary is a big deal in Japanese society. While we have a couple gender neutral pronouns, many aspects of the language from names to grammar structure to acceptable vocabulary are heavily codified by this gender binary. As Japanese society “modernizes”, for lack of a better word, it’s becoming more common to choose kanji characters and pronunciations for children that are gender neutral both in meaning and connotation. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the person will be perceived by a Japanese audience as being either masculine or feminine depending on their perceived gender.
It is exceedingly difficult to be a nonbinary individual in Japan. Our culture and social norms force most people to choose to be male or female. More important to your character than their name is the meaning assigned to the kanji. Do the kanji reflect particularly masculine or feminine qualities? How does the character feel about those meanings? How does the character handle being non-binary in a culture that makes your life very difficult simply for being non-binary? I think these are much more important things to consider beyond the name.
(edited lots)
ETA 1: Dear me, so many people in the comments citing anime as their source. I direct you to my discussion on why not to use anime/ manga character names.
I'm not with WWC anymore, but they've created an incredible online repository here on tumblr and on their website - seems a shame to waste it.
Most LLM AI used in English-speaking parts of the world aggregate results from the English-speaking parts of the web with highest traffic.
These results produced by majority-English speakers and low JPN cultural competency are thus as accurate and well-researched as many of the old comments in this post.
There's stuff AI is great for. I experiment with SLM and LLM AI a good deal myself, but I'd argue AI is a poor substitute for research in writing.
Remember: Using LLM AI for researcg is the same as a search engine presenting an aggregate of your search query as fact - but the aggregate of your search results is never actually fact.
In fact, I'd argue LLM AI for names often simply spits out most of what wikipedia says, but many writers already know wikipedia is a poor source for culturally competent naming.
People often say AI results for the SocSci topics we use for writing research possess an accuracy of 85%. That is too low for successful world-building and reader immersion.
Especially if you write for an audience - consider the following:
The poor quality of AI-generated writing suggestions is equally obvious in rapid-release JPN popular media, like light novels (Including related anime + manga/ webtoons). Any English speaker involved in JPN fandoms notices when JPN series in quasi-Western settings have characters with names that make no sense or just feel incredibly cringe.
The domestic JPN audience might not notice, but the rest of us do, right?
Many domestic JPN pop culture/ fandom writers use the same shortcuts as their Western counterparts (Including misusing AI for writing research). Still doesn't make the end product good.
I recently played through a bunch of very popular otome games set in Not!USA! and had intense secondhand embarrassment + poor immersion over naming choices.
Do what you want. However, if you can't bother to do basic research for your character names, know that bilingual readers in your audience (like me) are always taking note of who obviously puts in the effort, and who doesn't.
