Twelve Views from the Distance

Note about Japanese Names

ix x note about Japanese names On the cover and title page of this book, the author’s name appears in the Western order, with given name first and surname last: Mutsuo Takahashi , with Takahashi the surname. In Japan, however, people place surnames first, followed by their given names, so there the author would be known as Takahashi Mutsuo. (There are no middle names in Japan.) Commercial presses in the West that publish translations of Japanese literature have historically tended to put names in Western order. For instance,Western readers might know of the novelistYukio Mishima, whereas Japanese speakers call the same novelist Mishima Yukio. It is increasingly the trend, especially in academic publishing, to place East Asian names in the native order so that English speakers can learn to recognize people and places by the names the natives use. For this reason, when translating this book I placed the names in the text in the native Japanese order,with surname first.The only inconsistencies appear on the cover and title pages, and I hope readers will forgive those discrepancies for the sake of cataloging. ...