I have learned to write my name on name tags and doctor forms as “Kimi (kee-mee) Ishikawa.”  I have learned to correct people by explaining “My name is Kimi… KI like a key, and MI like me, myself and I. It’s Kimi—just like Mimi but with a K.”

I am not particular about people pronouncing my last name ee-she-kah-wah: even I use the sloppier American pronunciation ǐsh-uh-kah-wah… but having my first name pronounced “Kimmie” is a grating irritation. The host in an Australian youth hostel where I once stayed for four months persistently called me “kay-may” which tested my sanity for the first couple of weeks until I finally asked him, “What do you call New Zealanders?” 

When he answered “kay-whay” for Kiwi, I finally gave up that battle and accepted the “kay-may” as his accent rather than a mispronunciation.

I like my name, Kimi Ishikawa. I like the rhythm of it tripping off the tongue. I like that written in all caps, it’s KIWI upside-down. I like the way the “imi” looks in my cursive signature; five pointy bumps that are almost-but-not-really mirrored by the “awa” at the end. I like the simple kanji, and how the shape of the Kimi character echos the Ishi with the river character kawa separating them, so it has a not-quite-symmetrical aesthetic: 石川君. I like my name, but it hasn’t always been the easiest name to have.

My dad’s name was Joseph Bunichi Ishikawa. His parents immigrated to California as adults, before the birth of their second daughter. My dad was born and raised in central L.A., the youngest of five kids. His parents never spoke English fluently, and he chuckled remembering them calling him in a way that sounded like “Joe’s-ass.” That didn’t seem to bother him, but he was always embarrassed by his middle name. I imagine “Joe’s-ass bun-itchy” could have been a burden. 

My mom, who is white, insisted on Japanese names for her daughters, but my dad wouldn’t let her give a Japanese name to any of the boys. In the 1950s American heartland, an exotic name might have been an asset for a girl, but not for a boy. I was the fourth of six siblings. We were Bruce Alan, Jesse Steven, Chiyo Louise, Kimi Laurel, Ross Stuart, and Toki Alice. I suppose that most of my Japanese-side L.A. cousins more closely followed the more traditional Japanese-American naming conventions, with “American” first names and Japanese middle names. My oldest cousin is Alice Shizuko, and her nickname within her immediate family was “Sis” which I am guessing derived from Shizuko, although no one ever said that to me explicitly, and she was the only sister to two younger brothers, so it might have just been “sis” for sister.

We lived 2,000 miles from L.A., in a midwestern black and white town where my siblings and I stood out as being neither. The first week of junior high (and later, the first week of high school) I walked through the halls, startled by teacher after teacher declaring, “You must be an Ishikawa!”

After the first few, I started responding with, “No, I’m Kimi!”

As a kid, my parents told me my name meant princess. Somehow my mom had learned the Japanese national anthem, Kimi Ga Yo, in a Kansas elementary school in the ’30s. My name is the first word of the national anthem, and my sister’s name, Chiyo, is the first word in the second line. The first kanji character of our last name, Ishi, is also in the anthem. I took pride in my name, and my dad taught me how to write it in kanji. Our last name, Ishikawa, means rock river. As it turned out, our industrial little city was divided by the Rock River. So when my mom, as a third grade teacher in my school, taught her students the meaning of my name, kids on the playground called me “Princess Rock River! Princess of Pollution!”

It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I finally looked up kimi in my dad’s Japanese-English dictionary. That was my first time realizing that Japanese sounds can have many different meanings, depending on the kanji used. So kimi does mean princess, but it also means you, egg yolk, and feeling—as in a creepy, eerie feeling. The sentence to illustrate that last meaning in the dictionary was, “My, what a funny-looking worm!” My siblings enjoyed that discovery, and “Egg Yolk” became an affectionate nickname for me among my closest high school friends.

Kids took other liberties with my name. My favorite was “Kimi-kiss-a-cow-pie!” I think it was meant to offend, but it was funny and clever in an 8-year-old sort of way. 

There was a period when kids called me and my sister, "Creamy and Cheerios." Chiyo wanted to play along with the joke, which let me get away with spitting on her until she decided giving me a piggy-back ride made more sense. So I got piggy-back rides, and benefitted either way!

As a teenager, one of my friends asked someone, “Do you know Kimi Ishikawa?” 

The other person, confused, asked “Who is Kimi in Chicago?”

Out of all of my siblings, I am the only one who studied Japanese and lived in Japan. When I moved to Japan during college, I thought my name confusion would finally disappear. I was wrong. For starters, people were just perplexed when I told them my name, because it didn’t make sense to them that this foreigner had a Japanese name. People with a little more familiarity with Japanese Americans would ask (in Japanese), “Yes but what is your American name?” 

I had a Japanese driver’s license, which stated my name with Roman characters as “ISHIKAWA KIMI” rather than showing the Japanese kanji, because the information was taken from my passport, so that was my legal name. I once was stopped by a policeman who had the hardest time transcribing my name, even though I kept telling him my name in Japanese, and even told him the kanji… he wrote it with the katakana characters イヒカワ (i-hi-ka-wa), missing the character シ (shi): the H threw him off.

In Kyoto I studied a martial art, Shōrinji Kempo. I had my name embroidered on my dōgi: 石川君. The little kids got the biggest kick out of this, running around laughing and pointing at my gi saying “Ishikawa-kun! Ishikawa-kun!” The character for my name kimi can also be pronounced kun which means Mr. when referring to a young man (as opposed to san which would be used for an adult). So “Kimi Ishikawa” in Japanese kanji looks just like “Mr. Ishikawa.”

While in Kyoto I also took calligraphy lessons at a local temple, where we sign each piece of writing. For my signature, I didn’t want to write “Mr. Ishikawa,” so I looked up alternative ways to write kimi. There are many characters pronounced ki and also many pronounced mi so there were loads of combinations to choose from. I finally chose 石川季美, which means “beautiful season.” After about a year I got over that conceit, and let my teacher know that I was going back to my given name, 石川君. It might say “mister,” but it is more visually appealing, at least to me.

Kimi can mean “you,” as I had learned from the dictionary all those years earlier. There are lots of ways to say “you” in Japanese, depending on your relationship to the person and the meaning you are trying to convey. It turns out that the kimi type of “you” is often used familiarly when speaking to a kid, or a woman—especially to a girlfriend. So many, if not most, love songs in Japan are addressed to kimi.

At my Shōrinji Kempo farewell party we all went to a karaoke bar. All evening while singing the karaoke songs, my Shōrinji Kempo classmates changed the word kimi to Kimi-chan (an affectionate term for someone named Kimi). It was silly and fun and endearing.

For a while I commuted to Osaka to teach conversational English in one-on-one sessions in a tiny room where my knees almost touched those of my students in their facing chair. It was a soulless money-making school / English factory called the James Language Institute, and it troubled the managers to no end that I had a fully Japanese name—what would their students think? They needed me to have an “American” name. Surely I had an American name?

“In America everyone calls me Kimi Ishikawa.”

“Don’t you have a middle name?”

I really should have lied at this point, and just made up a name. I could have been Sue, or Anna. Instead I gave them my actual middle name: Laurel. So for the duration of my employment there, I was known as Rō-re-ru. When I left, one of my students gave me a lovely and thoughtful parting gift… a beautiful furoshiki embroidered ローレル for Rō-re-ru.

Ah, well.  Call me Rō-re-ru if you must. Just don’t call me Kimmie!

 

© 2024 Kimi Ishikawa