click for tl;dr in which I get absurdly academic about a show revolving around children’s card games
A note for those unfamiliar with Japanese: Japanese kanji characters can be pronounced different ways when they are combined with others to make words or names. So while the tou in Mutou would be read fuji to mean “wisteria” when written alone, yuugi is just… “game”.
Japanese names are written family name first; others are written given name first. Official Japanese spelling, literal transliteration, and my best guess at the intended Romanized spelling included for non-Japanese names.
If you see any mistakes in this, please do correct me!
武藤遊戯 Mutou Yuugi
武 mu - “warrior”. The bu in bushido.
藤 tou - “wisteria”. I don’t really have any idea where “Mutou” comes from. But it is pretty!
遊戯 yuugi - “game”. Yep. That’s his name! For about the first half of the series, I thought they’d at least written it differently, but, nope, it’s just the word “games”, haha.
海馬瀬人 Kaiba Seto
海馬 kaiba - “seahorse”. Speaking of “not a real name”… I have heard a Japanese legend that seahorses are baby dragons, and I assume this is where the name comes from. Unfortunately, I can’t find a source on this at the moment…
瀬 se - “tempest”. A storm at sea. Among other things, Seth, Kaiba’s namesake, was the Egyptian god of storms. He was also, rather appropriately, a usurper of his brother’s throne (see the myth of Isis and Osiris)… not that Priest Set intended to do anything of the sort.
人 to - “person”
海馬モクバ Kaiba Mokuba
海馬 kaiba - see above.
モクバ mokuba - The odd thing is that after coming up with such a nice name for Seto, Takahashi didn’t even bother to pretend that “Mokuba” is a real name—he writes it in katakana, the script used for foreign words and sound effects. I don’t even know. 8| The funny thing is that the most common kanji you’d use to write “Mokuba” would be 木馬, making his full name literally “Seahorse Treehorse”
城之内克也 Jounouchi Katsuya
城 jou - “castle”
之 no - possessive particle
内 uchi - “home”, “house”. So all together it would be something like “castle-house”.
克 katsu - “win”, “skillfully”
也 ya - “to be”. I think it’s nice that Takahashi gave him such a good-luck name :)
真崎 杏子 Mazaki Anzu
真 ma - “true”, “reality”.
崎 zaki - “cape” (as in the land form), “promontory”. A fairly common family name.
杏子 anzu - “apricot”. This is an alternate, and I think rather charming, reading of a name that is more commonly read “Kyoko”.
マリク・イシュタール Mariku Ishutaaru / Malik Ishtar
مالك mālik - My best guess as to what his name is supposed to be, since it’s quite a common name. Also Romanized “Maalik”. Arabic name (and noun), meaning “owner”, “possessor”, “holder”.
Another possible root of Malik’s name is the Arabic word malik (Arabic: ملك) meaning “king” or “chieftain”. The word most likely has its roots in the Semiticמלך m-l-k, orMoloch, a god primarily known in the Hebrew Bible for demanding the sacrifice of children by their parents.
On another interesting, and rather more obscure, note, according to Wikipedia, “In Islamic belief, Maalik (مالك) denotes an angel who guards the Hellfire, assisted by 19 zabaniya or guardians. In the Qur’an, sura 43, 77, Maalik tells the wicked who appeal to him that they must remain in Hell because “they abhorred the truth when the truth was brought to them.”(1)
In any case this name seems heavy with meaning, all of which seems to apply well to our Malik.
Ishtar - Assyrian/Babylonian goddess of love and sexuality. However, like many deities of love, Ishtar could be jealous, possessive and vengeful—“Even for the gods Ishtar’s love was fatal”(2). One surviving myth describes her descent into the underworld. She also appears in the epic of Gilgamesh.
(for my favorite rendering of Moloch and Astarte/Ishtar, see John Singer Sargent’s Pagan Gods :) )
獏良了 Bakura Ryou
獏 baku - The baku, a youkai spirit beast said to devour dreams and nightmares. Known as the mu in Chinese. The same kanji character is also used to refer to the tapir. (Baku at the Obakemono Project)
良 ra - “good”, “skillful”
了 ryou - “finish”, “completion”
孔雀舞 Kujaku Mai
孔雀 kujaku - “peacock” or “peahen”
舞 mai - “dance” or “twirl”. I often see this character in reference to swirling flower petals. Combined with “peacock”, this gives me the mental image of fluttering feathers. :)
本田 ヒロト Honda Hiroto
本田 honda - “rice paddy”. This is kind of the Japanese equivalent of naming somebody “Smith”.
ヒロト hiroto - Why is this in katakana? (see note about Mokuba) Hiroto is, again, quite a common name, with a number of different ways of writing it.
イシズ・イシュタール Ishizu Ishutaaru / Ishizu Ishtar
Ishizu - One Japanese way of writing the name of Isis (original pronunciation likely closer to Aset), Egyptian goddess of motherhood and magic. I totally thought Ishizu’s name was supposed to be Isis until I got to the Memory World arc and found out they were pronouncing her past incarnation’s name Aishisu (Isis)… at which point I pretty much threw up my hands and went “welp”.
Ishtar - see notes on Malik.
リシド・イシュタール Rishido Ishutaaru / Rishid Ishtar
Rishid - As far as I can tell, this isn’t an actual name, but it is very close to two Arabic names that are both Romanized as Rashid (Arabic: راشد, Rāshid) and (Arabic: رشيد, Rashīd), meaning “rightly guided”.
Ishtar - see notes on Malik.
アテム Atemu / Atem
I know that a lot of people feel strongly about how his name is spelled, and I realized that on the cartouche it’s written “Atemu”, so I have absolutely no desire to get into any sort of fight over this; if you want to spell it “Atemu”, that’s perfectly valid and fine with me. As far as I can tell, Atem is named for the creator god Atum (a-t-m), whose name comes from the word tem, “complete” or “to finish”. Atum was associated with the evening sun, and Ra with the morning sun, in the pair Atum-Ra. “Atum was considered a protective deity in regards to the king, and even called the father of the king. During the Pyramid Age, it was Atum who lifted the dead king from his pyramid to the heavens so that he could become a star-god, and in later times, Atum was protecting him during his journey in the Underworld.”(source)
If I missed any character whose name you’re particularly interested in, feel free to let me know and I’ll check it out! :)
Sources:
Wikipedia.org for Arabic words and names
(1)Guirand, F. “Assyro-Babylonian Mythology”. New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (trans. Aldington and Ames, London: Hamlyn, 1968), pp. 49–72.
Forever reblog my brosis Ardentblue when she gets absurdly academic about Yugioh. This sassy bitch has made Takahashi her stagecoach driver.
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