Today’s big news - our baby has now got a name!!

After lots of research in books about Japanese and Danish names, and after trying out several combinations, today we finally decided on a name for P-chan, as we have been calling him until now. So, without further ado, our baby’s name will be:

Junya Oliver Muto Asmund

武藤 アスモンド 隼弥 オリバー

We wanted to give him two names, one Japanese and one Danish. The Japanese name should be a name that could also be used in Denmark, and the Danish name should be pronounceable in Japanese.

We both liked the name Junya and that had been a favorite for a long time. The kanji that we eventually chose have the meanings: 隼 Falcon and 弥 Far / Long / Finally. The first kanji is pronounced jun and is not so common, but when it is used it is always for boys’ names. The second kanji is ya and is often used in names. Usually the function is to stress the meaning of the first kanji, or to give a meaning of far away or finally.

We both liked the kanji because of their relation to nature, and we thought the kanji for falcon was very beautiful. For the Danish name we also wanted something with nature, but at the same time we wanted an international name. Oliver is currently a very popular name in Denmark, and with the original meaning of olive tree we thought it would go well together with his Japanese bird name.

I hope you all like his name!

We will use Junya as his main name, so this is what we will be calling him ourselves most of the time. If he later in his life wants to use a more internationally sounding name, he can then choose to be called Oliver.

The letters on the paper (called a meimeisho) you see in the photo are drawn by Takako’s former student Mako, who is a shodo teacher, and also happened to work as a nurse at our hospital.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 18:33 and is filed under Junya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.