I’m hoping to move to Sapporo in the near future to further my education into a specific field however I’m a bit nervous about how my name would be registered in important documents. My name is hyphenated but it goes back generations. My grandfather had it and passed it to my grandmother, my father had it and passed it to my mother and now I have it, too. It’s not a very common circumstance so when I tried looking it up it was all just expecting parents talking about the ban on merging names. My concerns are A. How do I write it in Japanese and B. Could it cause issues in government databases? I appreciate any help or advice.
by DalPals
7 comments
If you want to live long term in Japan, change your name. I don’t even have a hyphenated name, but my full name is a bit on the long side and it causes a LOT of headaches. There are workarounds for most things, but it is very frustrating when you can’t register for things because some database can’t accept a certain kind of name and you can’t just shorten it yourself because they’ll deny you when your registered name doesn’t match your ID.
Whatever you do just make sure the names listed in any Japanese form is consistent with your passport.
My understanding is hyphens can be written as =
I’ve done that on official documents since uni.
For example Day-Lewis could be デイ＝ルイス.
Alternatively you could write them as two names デイ・ルイス
Look into registering an official alias when you move here. You can use the alias for all of your important documents like opening bank accounts (etc).
I gave up on mine and just made it a second middle name, and I only used middle names if I had to.
FWIW I have the same problem with hyphenated names here in the US as well, some databases don’t support it
It will be a pain, but it’s not the end of the world. You would write it in Japanese with a = instead of an -.
It will cause you some issues in cases where you must write your name as it appears on the passport but the receiving website/database can’t handle the character. But in the truly important cases there will be some workaround.
You can also register an alias for use in Japan. That’s your best bet for daily stuff.
I just drop the hyphen completely and make it two separate middle names. I didn’t change anything on the documents, but no one ever questioned it.
So i use middle name as two names without an hyphen.
It works in most cases, but a long name will always create problems at some point, more than the hyphen itself.