What's in a Name?

So, the last post was kind of a non-post and I feel like I should make up for it. So here you go, have a Japan story.

One of the by-products of teaching English in a small community in Japan is that you tend to be around kids a lot. And when you're around kids a lot, it is inevitable that you are also going to be around their parents at some point. Because kids and parents go together like... like two things that go really well together.

Yesterday, one of my elementary schools held an open house day. What this amounted to was a horde of parents descending upon the school to watch their children in class. I'm unsure if they were there to support their kids or if they were there to see what kind of teachers their kids have. Possibly both reasons.

At any rate, I was not given any classes to demonstrate. Fine by me. The less responsibility foisted upon my shoulders, the better. Instead, I wandered about from class to class, showing my smiley face to all the little kidlets and saying hello to the parents.

At one classroom, I was approached by a particularly happy looking woman.

"Are you the English teacher?" she asked.

I replied in the affirmative.

"Oh great!" Her smile opened up wide enough to show her pearly whites. "You see my son over there? He has a younger brother now! Well, he already is the younger brother - he has an older sister, you know - but now there's another younger brother in the family."

Thinking she was just excited to talk to a foreigner who knew her son, I congratulated her. Given how fit she looked, I guessed the birth was not an immediately recent event. Still, it must be recent enough that it was noteworthy. I decided it has happened in the last few months.

"Well," she continued, "I told my son that he could name the new baby. He thought about it for a little bit, then said 'Canada'."

She laughed.

"Canada?" I replied, dumbfounded. Would a Japanese person actually use a name like that?

"That name is a little strange, of course," she said, "so we went with Kanata."

I told her I thought that was an excellent choice for a name. At that point her son barreled out of the classroom and into his mother. I grinned while she explained to the boy what she had just told me. He glanced at me shyly, then ran back into the classroom, presumably to escape my piercing gaijin eyes.

And there you have it. Your Jeffles has inspired the names of children in Japan. If that isn't internationalization, nothing is.

~Jeffles