How are Names of Foreign Asian Players Written?

Ah, cross-cultural baseball questions! I really like these.

Taking the Taiwanese part of the question first, Japanese Kanji are all derived from Chinese in the first place - 漢字 literally meaning "Chinese character." So it's not surprising that Taiwanese players have their names written the same at home and in Japan.

But there are cases when you will often see them written in Katakana. That would be for one of two reasons:

1. The player wants to emphasize the pronunciation of his name
2. The character isn't in the Shift JIS character set

I think that the latter is the most often used reason by the press. Since so many of them are stuck in the Microsoft world, and despite Unicode being available in Redmond's poor excuse of an operating system, many applications (like MS Word) insist on restricting users of their Japanese version to the Shift JIS character set. Linux, Mac OS/X, and the Open Source world makes no such restrictions, easily allowing any character in the world to be mixed in the same document. But since most reporters still carry around Microsoft based computers to file their reports, they're restricted to what the monopoly abuser will allow them to use.

One would think that Mainland Chinese players would fall under the same category as Taiwanese players. However, they use the "simplified Chinese" character set which is a derivative of Chinese characters that branched off well after Kanji were imported to Japan. Therefore, many of the Mainland Chinese characters have no direct rendering in the standard 5,000 or so characters mainly used in Japan.

While I've heard stories of Japanese who have gone to China and communicated via Kanji on paper napkins, doing so in Taiwan is a great deal easier as Taiwan still uses more characters that are in common with those used in Japan.

One of the things that I had learned in my linguistics courses in college is that the spoken languages of Japanese and Korean are from the same language family (similar to how English and German are both Germanic languages, or Spanish, Italian, and French are all Latin languages). However, Japan's written language is borrowed from China. Therefore many concepts can be expressed and understood despite the spoken languages having little (音読み - on-yomi) to nothing (訓読み - kun-yomi) in common. A recognizable equivalent in this sphere would be the use of Latin (prefixes, suffixes, roots) in English words.

Now, on to Korea.

As I mentioned, Japanese and Korean are both in the same language family. However, Korea's writing system is not derived from Chinese as it was in Japan. Unfortunately, I'm not a scholar on the history of Hangul, so I'll leave that to others. (Please, I am interested for someone to expand this part.) However, I have made a number of observations in transliterating it.

First of all, there appear to be radicals similar to Katakana. For example:

    아 = a    사 = sa    나 = na
    악 = ak   삭 = sak   낙 = nak
    안 = an   산 = san   난 = nan
    암 = am   삼 = sam   남 = nam

Notice the repetition of many of the pieces? Read from upper left to lower right? When I first saw this I thought, "It's Katakana being combined within one character to create other Katakana!"

So that takes care of pronouncing the Hangul characters, but what about meaning? Do Hangul characters have meanings like they do in Japanese and Chinese? Well, considering that names all seem to have equivalents in Japanese, I'm guessing that they do. But why would I think that they have equivalents in Japanese in the first place?

Again, in my explorations into Korean baseball, I've come across many sites and the bilingual "Official 2005 Guide Book to Korean Pro Baseball." The interesting part about the bilingual guide is that one of the two languages is not Korean - it's Japanese. All of the players have a 漢字 name, and the names are consistent when you go back and look up their Hangul. For example, the surname "Kim" (김) is always 金, "Lee" (이) is always 李 (although often transliterated as "yi" or "i"), and "Park" (박) is always 朴 (although also transliterated as "Pak" and "Bak").

Anyway, I suspect that Kanji are a relic left over from Japan's occupation of Korea during the second quarter of the 20th century. But I may be (and probably am) wrong on this matter. These are simply my observations, and I look forward to people with more knowledge in this area to contribute.

One final note: Many of the Kanji used for Korean names are not available to users of Shift JIS either. One Japanese newspaper often writes 李 承燁 as "李承■ (■は火へんに華)" because Microsoft won't let them write the name properly. (It never ceases to amaze me the length people will go to to defend their use of Microsoft products when they won't allow them to do what they want and are clearly inferior to Open Source. But, that's a different story.) So Korean names also often suffer from people being bent to conform to software limitations instead of having technology working for people. Thus you get their names in Katakana, or partially in Katakana (李承ヨプ).

Wow, WBS, thank you SO much for the detailed explanation! That was very helpful. So, can I also get clarification on how Japanese people would read these names?

"Taiwanese players have their names written the same at home and in Japan"

So, can Japanese people read these names since their reading in Taiwan is Simplified Chinese vs. Japanese?

And, for Koreans, I think I understand you saying Japanese will use a Kanji that sounds like a Hangul word. For example, 李 is a Kanji that the Japanese will know to pronounce as "yi" or "i", correct?

Again, very interesting and thank you so much for the help. Japanese baseball is helping me learn so much more than just the game. The old quote is so accurate: "It is true that baseball is just a game...and, the Grand Canyon is just a hole in the ground."