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It's relevant in the sense that it reduces the diversity in names. If the parents could both keep their surnames, they'd have two alternatives left for their ch
by GolDDranks 3y ago
It's relevant in the sense that it reduces the diversity in names. If the parents could both keep their surnames, they'd have two alternatives left for their children instead of one. I bet that more often than currently, people would choose the rarer name for their children.
- kgwgk 3y agoThey could alredy be choosing the rarer name for the couple and the children.
- GolDDranks 3y agoBut the thing is, it doesn't happen. As it is said in the article, in 95% of cases, men don't want to change their name, and woman yield, regardless of the rarity/commonness of the name.
- 1123581321 3y agoWhy would they choose the rarer name? People always like popular names, so it seems at best it wouldn’t help and at worst it would risk faster erasure. If Japan wants a legal solution to this, how about requiring the less popular surname to be kept by the new couple, based on official statistics?
- autoexecbat 3y agoThere's popular, and then there's double digit % popular. I have a very popular first name, but it's still way less than 1% of population for my gender and it's already "too common" at my workplace such that we have to use surnames instead
- tomjakubowski 3y agoAt more than one workplace now we've had to come up with a system for distinguishing our Tims.
- neurostimulant 3y agoHaving a popular name is not that great. When I was in high school, me and three of my classmates share the same name. We had to comes up with some nicknames to refer to each other.
- 1123581321 3y agoI have the most popular name in my generation for my language, so I understand, but people still choose them. The desire to choose a pleasing sound that others will also like is strong and cross-cultural, and applies to surnames as well when a choice is possible.
- GolDDranks 3y agoTo avoid confusion. We had three Nakamura's at office one time, so we defaulted to first names. We currently have two Nomura's and we use nicknames for them. I've also met people who – against the normal, mainstream Japanese way – basically always prefer their first names, because their last name is so common people are going to mix them up with... someone. I sometimes sense a kind of an aura from these people: they don't want to be seen as just "one of the Satо̄s or Tanakas". (Btw. those are the exact names of the people that came to mind, whom I felt that aura of not wanting to use their last name.) I think that those kind of people would choose the rarer name for their kids. But they don't also want to change theirs, because they are in the middle of a professional carrier, and being the busy people they are, they don't want to stir things up.