by Anna Kunnecke
I'm very fond of my last name. I've sworn to hang onto it come hell or high water or marital status, and I've even bequeathed it to my daughter. To tell the truth, I feel so strongly about the whole topic of last names and women that I am going to stop talking about it RIGHT NOW before I start frothing and smoking.
I pronounce it, just like my Kentucky relatives do, as Kunn- neck- kee, although my German friends weep a little when they hear me say it. Apparently some long-lost ancestor brought our name and genes over from Germany, but it's had a long time in Kentucky to morph from the German Koon-ecckh-uh into something more friendly to the American tongue.
When my parents came to Japan (lo these 25 years ago) they were sat down to figure out what their name would be in Japanese. It's not as silly as it sounds; when you transfer a name into an entirely different alphabet and phonetic system, a little creativity and political savvy are often required. (For the record, if you think you'll ever live in Japan, you really should avoid naming your kid Ben, Deb, or Gary. In Japanese, those mean excrement, fat, and diarrhea. Please trust me on this.)
But it turned out that by happy accident our family name translated quite well into Japanese: Kah- neh- ki. カネキ And when you attach the most obvious kanji characters, it means something fortuitous: Money Tree. 金木 It's not a common name here, but it sounds very Japanese, and a collective shout went up in our car one summer on the way up to the beach when we all saw the characters painted on a venerable old factory: Look! That's us! We gazed at it so fondly, you might have thought we'd be inheriting it.
My own name went quite efficiently into katakana: アンナ. It's now quite popular among pop tarts and models, but for a long time I was the only あんなaround. I learned early to accentuate that middle syllable, the nnn sound, because without it, my name becomes あな、穴、and people, that means hole. And if you don't think I went through a few years of hell in middle school over that, then let me sit you down right now and explain to you why you should hire other people to name your kids.
When I say it quickly on the phone, my name confuses people. They think it must just be an unusual Japanese name. Then, halfway through the conversation, when my normally-fluent Japanese hits a word I don't know, or I stumble on a complicated grammatical construction, they do not think, "Wow, this poor gaijin is working so hard to speak Japanese!" No. What they think is, "Wow, this person's an idiot, and the school system is obviously going to hell in a handbasket."
Similarly, when I introduce myself, most people assume that my last name must come from a Japanese husband. No, I explain, it's bastardized German. Oh, but it sounds Japanese. Well, yeah, it turns out my pioneer ancestors' neighbors weren't so good at German, so they changed the pronunciation and...
I am happy to go down this conversational rabbit trail with them, because it gives me a minute to take some deep breaths and not tear off screaming down the path I really want to take, which is: What makes you assume I would automatically TAKE my husband's name, you sexist jerks???
The end.
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