Name dropping

Arecent study led by an economist at Tohoku University posited that by 2531, all Japanese could have the same surname, Sato, if the country keeps the archaic law that forbids married couples from using separate surnames.

Japanese couples are free to choose a surname when they marry, but in almost all cases, it is the woman who changes her name. Unlike other major economies in the world, the name change isn’t just a convention, but a legal requirement.

On my trip to Japan last month, the issue of surnames was one of the reasons behind the long waits at airports. Two of our passports, those issued by Malaysia and Singapore, do not differentiate between family names and given names, which must have confused the airline computers in Hong Kong and Japan because multiple attempts to print boarding passes and luggage tags at self-service kiosks failed.

Malaysia and Singapore have a different naming convention to the surname-given name or first name-last name configurations. In both countries, Malay-Muslim citizens and some citizens of South Asian descent do not have family names that are passed down, but follow a patronymic naming pattern. A person is named “B son of A”, where B is his given name and A is the name of his father. B’s son will be “C son of B”, and on it goes. The present Han Chinese naming convention of a surname followed by a given name, e.g. the actress Gong Li (her surname is Gong) and this columnist Wee Kek Koon (my surname is Wee), dates from the Qin dynasty (221-206BC). In the centuries before the Qin, a high-born Chinese person had both xing and shi, in addition to their given name. Commoners usually had only given names.

At the risk of oversimplifying, xing indicated bloodlines while shi was the marker of one’s affiliation with a group such as a tribe.

Xing was passed down to descendants whereas shi could be changed. In time, xing and shi were used interchangeably and commoners also began to use them in their names.

During the Qin dynasty, names were made uniform by converting all xing and shi into surnames that would be passed down through the male line unchanged. This configuration has remained basically unchanged for 2,000 years.