Nothing But Words

Baby X: The Name Game, Part IV - We Have a Winner!

While Kai and Maria were away in Denver I had dinner over at my friend Chris’ house, and his wife had one of her students from Japan visiting. Also, Chris is half Japanese and speaks the language. So it was an ideal opportunity to get more feedback on our list of possible names. They pointed out that Nikko, Saigen, and Kigen aren’t really names. In Japan these days you can make up a name if you want to, but those three would be considered very unusual. They liked Kenta, and also suggested Genta, if we wanted to do something with Gen. They also mentioned that “-zo” is a trendy ending for names in Japan these days, so they suggested Hanzo and Genzo. I thought Genzo sounded too much like Gonzo though!

So I called Maria the next day, and she had some new suggestions too, but neither of us were too enthusiastic about any of them. We’d reached the point where we were getting jaded about the whole thing. But then she called me back about half an hour later with an epiphany. She thought of a name we had previously overlooked: Eidan. It’s pronounced almost the same as the Celtic name Aiden (which means “fiery”), and the Jewish name Aden (which means “handsome”). In Japanese, there are different Kanji characters you can put together that will give you the same pronunciation but different meanings. The characters Maria and her folks came up with for Eidan mean “a wise decision,” or “an intelligent choice.” So this name is very good at promoting itself ;-). We both liked it immediately, but there was one more test the name had to pass: Maria’s parents wanted to examine the name’s “kakusu.” As explained on the Japlish Japanese Superstitions page, this refers to the number of strokes used in writing the Kanji characters for the name. If they added up to an unlucky number, then they’d have to think of different characters for the name. Fortunately the characters passed the kakusu test. And it’s a good thing we’re not in Japan - if we were, we’d also have to make sure the characters were on the government’s list of 2,231 officially sanctioned Kanji characters (characters not on the list cannot be registered - see more in the article What’s in a name? if you’re curious about this and the other unique challenges involved with choosing a Japanese name) .

It’s been a couple days since Maria first thought of the name, and we still like it a lot, so we have a winner: Eidan Lee Toppa.