How will my name be translated into Kanji? Is it possible to translate non-Japanese names into Kanji?
There are about 5,000 Kanji characters (Japanese people use about 3,000), and although there aren’t Kanji characters that can exactly represent your name, there are always some characters of which pronunciations are close enough to do that. We pick characters that can phonetically represent the names. Since there are always several ways to pronounce a Kanji character, even people in Japan may not immediately know how your name is pronounced (depending on how close the pronunciation of Kanji is to the real pronunciation). So, when they see your hanko, they may not immediately recognize it with your name, but if you tell your name, they will say, “Oh yes! That’s a clever translation!” There is another approach you might want to consider. Some English name have meanings. For example, consider a name like Blackwood. For a name like this, we can try a different approach, which is to pick characters that mean black and wood. With this approach, people in Japan cannot know how your name is pr
