introduce myself with Japanese culture

Naming culture in Japan

Hello, everyone! I am Yoshika as an exchange student here at LMU.

This is quite sudden, but I’ll show you the word “芳果” and ask you two questions: Can you pronounce this Chinese character(kanji) correctly?, and Do you know the exact meaning? Probably most of you have no ideas because you use the different alphabets.

The answer is Yoshika, it shows you how to write my name in kanji and means “good/sweet smelling fruits”. My parents gave me this name 19 years ago with a wish for me to become an attractive person to others like a fruit with sweet fragrant attracts to animals. Do you like this story? I love it and also I’m proud of my name, but this is not the end of the story, it is still continued.

My parents run flower shop and love plants, so they wanted to name their children something botanical. That’s why my name is Yoshika. Also I have two sisters, and their names are consisted of kanji with the meaning of plants, too. My older sister is “花実”: Kasane, which means flower and fruit and my younger sister is “沙苗”: Sanae, which represents precious plant.

By the way, who can find the common point of three? Please look at them carefully. All of them have the radical “艹”, called Kusakanmuri, and I guess intuitive people can presume what I am going to say. That is “the radical is related to botanical, too”. There are hundreds of thousands of kanji in Japan, but it is common to choose your favorite kanji and create artistic, unique, one-and-only name here. How cool is it? I feel same kanji radical is something like a bond with my sisters , which is also favorite part of my first name.

I’m Japanese, but not from Tokyo

Plus, I’d like to talk about where I am from originally. As I told you, I came from Japan, but can you guess which city of Japan I am from?

–Which city do you live in Japan? Are you from Tokyo?- How many times have I been asked the question since I came to Munich? Maybe it’s over 50 times. And also I had to explain about the features of my home town every time and I’m a little bit tired of it, because there is nothing famous, fun and interesting in my place: SAITAMA prefecture. Not only I feel it, but also a survey shows the result that Saitama is one of the least attractiveness places in Japan. The survey asking responds to rate the attractiveness of Japanese prefectures is conducted every year and in 2021 it ranked in 45the place of 47 ( oh no…).

But just so that you won’t be misunderstood or have only a bad impression on it, despite you’ve never been to Saitama, in the end, I’d like to say it is good place to live in. Saitama is located in the middle of Japan, just north of Tokyo, so you can get to the center of Tokyo easily. From my city, it takes only 15minutes to get there by train. Moreover, living expenses is cheaper than Tokyo. It might be better place than other prefectures for some reasons. If you want to stay in Japan somedays, you won’t forget my story.

I was going to finish my blog, but actually I found the interesting article about Saitama, which said it has a lot of sightseeing spots and amazing cultures like the pictures below. It could be just Japanese people including me though, Saitama might be beautiful place for international people. I need to learn about my home town more. By the time I leave from Munich I would be proud of my home city, Saitama like I love my name, I hope so.

Thank you so much for reading through to the end, See you!