Essay

What's in a name?

By Mariko Kato

Once at Oxford, I joined the other nervous first years in re-establishing my own identity. And for me, it was from the first introductions that I was forced to re-assess everything, starting from my name.

During my childhood in South East London, my name, which was common enough in Japan, had metamorphosed into something unrecognizable. Thanks to the English intonation and inclination to elongate vowel sounds, "Mariko Kato" came to be pronounced "Muree-koe Kay-toe." Soon, this way of pronouncing my name became so ingrained in my brain that I was introducing myself as "Muree-koe Kay-toe." The correct pronunciation faded away in my consciousness. (In fact, from secondary school, I was known as "Squeak" because of my high-pitched laughter and challenged height.)

So it was a great shock when my Oxford colleagues started calling me "Mariko." The shock was three-fold: First, I was no longer the embodiment of a mouse's cry "Squeak"; second, my name was being pronounced almost in the perfect Japanese way (with the inevitable residue of the "r" sound in Mariko); and third, most astoundingly, my new friends hadn't needed prompting. It took a few weeks for my brain to register this and react when I was called.

It turned out that many of my fellow students were more knowledgeable about Japan than I was; and, more disturbingly, they were interested in me precisely because I was Japanese. No longer was my Japanese identity incidental but my most engaging quality. Until then, I had only ever needed to explain that sushi actually uses raw fish (not just vegetables as it is often sold in the U.K.) or that Japanese people don't really walk around dressed like samurai any more. But now, my friends were talking about Akira Kurosawa's earlier films, the best onsen in Hokkaido, their favorite Japanese pop songs to sing at karaoke (pronounced as it should be, not "karee-oh-kee" as it is generally known). In debates, I was forced to pretend that I knew about the latest scandal in Japanese politics, the beginnings of Japanese Buddhism and the reconstruction of post-war Japan.

If only I could have given the excuse that these people were "Japanologists," students of Japanese studies. But in reality the majority were just genuinely passionate about Japan, a passion that took them deeper than noodle bars and Nintendo. I soon became ashamed of my complacency about my Japanese identity. It was the first time that it hit home that Japan was, and always will be, my home country, and if I didn't know about it, it was my loss. Being born to Japanese parents, I had been given a ticket to gain real insight into this intriguing country that so many of my friends longed to discover.

Shukan ST: March 14, 2008

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