When I was a teenager, I was one of those anime fans. Kids nowadays would call it cringe.
I was obsessed with Japan. I watched Japanese anime, played Japanese video games and fancied myself cultured enough to use a Japanese name as my online handle. "In Japanese, it means, Green Eyes, Soul," I remember knowingly telling a friend, who also did not speak Japanese so she acted like I was not, in fact, full of shit.
"Cool," she says.
I look back on those days with embarrassment. I was a lonely kid who lived in a boring suburb trying to make my boring life something worth bragging about. I'm generally against white people using Japanese names, especially if they don't have any connection to the country besides liking anime. Words have meaning and words in a foreign language are especially delicious to affluent white folks, at least ten percent of whom are practicing yoga right now.
"We're going to do a meditation now called 'So Hum,' the yoga instructor kindly explains to me. "It's not English, but don't worry about the meaning—we'll just be using it to center our breath." I immediately start to worry. What if I'm saying "you motherfucker" while saluting to the sun god? I'm not superstitious, but I don't touch Ouija boards. Even if I don't believe in spirits, that doesn't mean they don't exist. People say they don't believe in climate change and it it hasn't prevented the ocean from getting hotter. I spend the rest of class on my phone looking up what so'ham means. Turns out it's a Hindu mantra and thankfully its meaning neither involved mothers nor fucking.
When I was thirty, I moved to Japan for work. Gone was the wide-eyed weeaboo and in its place a person who saw the ugliness of the country I once loved. Of all the developed nations, Japan is ranked 116th behind in both gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights—and it is notorious for its xenophobia, both casual and systemic. Immigration regularly detains non-Japanese people and denies them access to medical care.
My partner Matt and I have hard-to-pronounce last names. It was bad enough in the United States when our names had a twenty percent chance of being properly spelled—but the confusion mixed with the exceptional "can do" attitude of Japanese service folks is a disaster. They would try, unfailingly, to sound out our names as we gave them. Imagine a young woman, ear pressed to the phone while listening to me. My name is in a foreign tongue she has never heard before, but by god she will get it right! She stumbles over it and I respell. After the fifth time I cut her off—for their sanity and mine and leave my name butchered.
"Yes," I say brightly. "Good job. That's me. I am Mr. Hot Potato." We both sigh a collective sigh of relief and get on with our day.
My partner, Matt, has a last name that is different than mine for the reason that neither of us wanted to go through the trouble of telling our friends—who had only just mastered the spelling of our last names—that they would have to learn new ones. He has a different problem. His last name, although hard to pronounce, is also close to a very common Japanese name—Kimura. Think of it like the English "Mr. Brown." Easy to say, easy to remember.
No matter how much he has tried to use his given name, at the end of the day, he is Mr. Kimura.
"I don't know what to do about this Mr. Kimura thing," I say to him one night at dinner. "We got a package today for a Mr. Kimura. Don't you think it's weird that you're going by a Japanese name?" Matt looks at me with puzzlement. "I don't really see the harm. It's easier for everyone."
"You don't look like a Kimura," I say, implicitly adding, you're not Japanese. He squints at me. "What are you, the world's leading expert on Kimuras?"
I squint back. I think back to my Green Eyes, Soul days, when I was appropriating names to make me sound fancy. "Well, I'm not Mr. Kimura." Matt shrugs. "Okay, you're not Mr. Kimura."
In the following weeks, Matt uses the name Kimura. I hear him making appointments left and right, with ease. No longer does he have to spell his name five times over—he's hanging up the phone within a minute of calling. For me, it takes at least five to muddle through the name part. I become jealous at how easily he moves through Japanese society with his shiny new name and his devil-may-care attitude. So'ham, you motherfucker, I think. If only I could have it that easy. On the weekend, I call a popular bar. It's crowded and I can barely hear the staff over the din. "I'd like to make a reservation."
"What?"
I raise my voice louder. "I'D LIKE TO MAKE A RESERVATION FOR 2 AT 6PM." This already bodes well."
Ok. Name?"
I spell out my name for him. He waits. I hear the din of the crowd for an uncomfortably long time.
"Did you uh, get i—"
He cuts me off. "I didn't get that at all. Can you repeat?" I do so, again, and the same thing happens. "Can you repeat?" When I'm on the third time, I find myself shaking my head, which he's probably also doing. It's not that I'm attached to my last name; I like it well enough, but not enough to fight through multiple spellings. And even if I told him the American name "Smith," it's still not a sure thing that he would spell it right. If having your own name misspelled is embarrassing, it's even more humiliating to have a pseudonym you picked because your name is un-spellable still be spelled wrong.
I sigh. I know why I'm so afraid of becoming Mr. Kimura. I'm afraid of becoming one of those people; people who are cringey or who don't understand cultural context or appropriate other cultures in a way that is embarrassing at best and harmful at worst. I'm worried I'll become the people in my boring suburb, who still use the phrase, "indian giver" unironically, the people that I so desperately wished to distance myself from when I was a teen. Even now, in my thirties, they haunt me.
Goddamnit, I'm tired.
"You know what?" I say. "I'm Kimura."
A beat.
I lean closer to the phone. "Do you need me to spell it?"
"Oh no, I'm good," he says. We both breathe out a collective sigh of relief.
"Got you for 2 at 6PM. See you soon, Mr. Himura."
