Romanising names

[Jim Harper]

I use the western name order, and refer to an individual using their family name. This is partly because I've been lead to believe that the Japanese themselves prefer to use western name order when they're being referred to in English (please correct me if I'm wrong there!), but also because it seems to be the prevalent trend in English-language works on Japanese cinema.
 
On a related note, it seems to be increasingly popular to use diacritics to indicate vowel length with Japanese words. Most sources us the macron (the dash over the letter), while certain prominent ones use a circumflex. Since the circumflex (to the best of my knowledge) isn't used in European languages to indicate length, is this accurate? Any help would be appreciated!
 
Jim Harper.
Alexander Jacoby <a_p_jacoby at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Picking up on Aaron's observation about name order, is there actually any consensus about this? Some scholars preserve Japanese name order, some don't. Noel Burch was I think the first to keep Japanese order in English, (though making the rather smug decision to give Sessue Hayakawa's name in Western order, because he was "incorrigibly Westernised" - logically, should he then have reversed Naruse and Mizoguchi's name order when talking about their allegedly Westernised postwar work?). Preserving Japanese order has become gradually more common over the last three decades, but to this day, some persist with the Westernised rendering - as in Mark LeFanu's new book on Mizoguchi.
 
When Japanese people introduce themselves in English, they usually Westernise their name order; on the other hand, when they transliterate our names into katakana, they preserve Western order in the transliteration. But in international terms, there's no consistency in how we deal with this. The Hungarians also put surname first, but we don't talk about Jancso Miklos or Tarr Bela. Yet we always give Chinese and Korean names in native order - which creates confusion among those non-specialists who don't understand. I do sometimes get annoyed by journalists talking about "Yimou's films" seemingly oblivious to the fact that his family name is Zhang; and there's an article about Uchida (not mine!) which keeps Japanese name order on first reference and then refers to the director as "Tomu" throughout. What is the general practice of people on the list?
 
ALEX


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