Hello, Kaiton-ga!
Having spent 2 years in Japan, studying Japanese in college, and
achieving a relative fluency in the language I found your question
interesting. I must admit, although I met many different people in
Japan, I never met anyone by the name of “Kaiton,” but I’ll be the
first to admit that I did not meet all 130 million or so people who
live in Japan! To answer your question I thought I’d first give a
background on the Japanese language.
Background (from http://www.geocities.com/japanime_2/japanese_webpage_terms1.htm;
“The Original Modern Reader’s Japanese-English Character Dictionary”
by Andrew Nelson; and personal knowledge)
Japanese relies on three separate writing systems to convey meaning:
1. A phonetic “alphabet” called hiragana, representing the 46 basic
sounds of the language (there are an additional 2 symbols used in more
“classical” Japanese);
2. 2. Katakana, the same 46 sounds using alternate characters, used
primarily for foreign words and onomatopoeias; and
3. 3. Kanji, a system of pictorial writing used to form nouns and the
roots of verbs and other descriptive words. Names (being nouns) would
be written in kanji.
Kanji were borrowed from the Chinese language and modified to fit the
needs of the Japanese language. The problem with Chinese characters is
that there are so many of them—tens of thousands! Having no phonetic
alphabet, the Chinese must continually add characters in order to
create new words. The Japanese recognized the potential difficulties
in mastering such a plentiful language and devised a formal method of
instruction beginning in the first grade. They designated 881
characters as the Education kanji list. These are divided up fairly
evenly into Grades 1-6, with certain characters being learned by ALL
1st graders in Japan, and so on through 6th grade. The government then
designated 969 more characters as Joyo—or general-use—kanji, to be
learned through high school, representing roughly 80% of the
characters used in daily life, including newspapers, etc. This makes a
total of 1850 characters that are generally understood and used by
most Japanese. There are an additional 92 characters that are called
Jinmei—or proper name—kanji, which in conjunction with the Toyo kanji
are approved for use in naming. This limits the number of variants
that may be present in naming (eliminating the “Jenny,” “Jennie,”
“Jennee,” etc. type of spelling fiascos present in American schools!).
Popular Names in Japan, 2002 (from
http://www.yoshihama.co.jp/namecon2002.html)
According to a list at the above website, Kaito is the 5th most
popular boys name given in 2002. I know that your name is Kaiton, but
there could possibly be a link between the two. You can check out
other popular names there, but the site is entirely in Japanese. The
boys’ names are listed on the left side, and Kaito is the entry at
level 5. Kaito as written here is composed of two characters, “kai”
meaning the ocean, and “to” meaning the Milky Way.
Looking for Kaiton
Not being satisfied with “Kaito” I searched on different Japanese name
sites for “Kaiton.” The best lists I found were at the following two
websites:
http://hsb.baylor.edu/html/vanauken/JapaneseNames.html
http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/jap.html
Neither of these listed Kaiton, but one did list Kaito as a boys name
used in Japan. I then performed a search on Google using only your
name and found various links, mostly to stories written by Dr.
Suekiichi Kaiton. He is a writer of online fanfiction, a form of
writing whereby an author “borrows” characters from popular works and
creates his own storylines. Often fanfiction is based on Japanese
“manga” (comics) and “anime” (animation). Dr. Suekiichi often lists
his e-mail address to contact him and he may be a source of
information regarding your name. You can find his contact information
at:
http://hermes.spaceports.com/~evafics/regular/perhaps.html
I hope all of this information is helpful. Thank you for giving me a
chance to exercise my Japanese brain cells and revisit some fond
memories. If you need any other information don’t hesitate to ask.
Boquinha-ga
Search strategy:
Japanese + names + kanji
(://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+names+characters&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=20&sa=N)
Kaito (://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=kaiton)
Kaito + suekiichi (://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=kaiton+suekeiichi)
Jinmei + kanji + list
(://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=jinmei+kanji+list) |
