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Japanese names are usually written in kanji, although some names use hiragana or even katakana, or a mixture of kanji and kana. While most "traditional" names use kun'yomi (native Japanese) kanji readings, a large number of given names and surnames use on'yomi (Japanese sound, often Chinese-based) kanji readings as well.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
The romanization of Japanese is the use of Latin script to write the Japanese language. [1] This method of writing is sometimes referred to in Japanese as rōmaji ( ローマ字 , lit. ' Roman letters ' , [ɾoːma(d)ʑi] ⓘ or [ɾoːmaꜜ(d)ʑi] ) .
Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. This was particularly common among women in the Meiji and Taishō periods, when many poor, illiterate parents were unwilling to pay a scholar to give their daughters names in kanji. [9]
There are two hiragana pronounced ji (じ and ぢ) and two hiragana pronounced zu (ず and づ), but to distinguish them, particularly when typing Japanese, sometimes ぢ is written as di and づ is written as du. These pairs are not interchangeable. Usually, ji is written as じ and zu is written as ず. There are some exceptions.
The Japanese names for Japan are Nihon (にほん ⓘ) and Nippon (にっぽん ⓘ). They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本. Since the third century, Chinese called the people of the Japanese archipelago something like "ˀWâ" (倭), which can also mean "dwarf" or "submissive".
There are a small number of municipalities in Japan whose names are written in hiragana or katakana, together known as kana, rather than kanji as is traditional for Japanese place names. [1] Many city names written in kana have kanji equivalents that are either phonetic manyōgana, or whose kanji are outside of the jōyō kanji. [citation ...
Takeshi (たけし in hiragana or タケシ in katakana) is a masculine Japanese given name. Written forms. Forms in kanji can include: 武, "warrior" 毅, "strong"