The change is designed to halt the use of kirakira (shiny or glittery) names that have proliferated among parents hoping to add a creative flourish
Parents in Japan will no longer have free rein over the names they give their children, after the introduction this week of new rules on the pronunciation of kanji characters.
The change is designed to halt the use of kirakira (shiny or glittery) names that have proliferated among parents hoping to add a creative flourish to their children’s names – creating administrative headaches for local authorities and, in some cases, inviting derision from classmates.
While the revisions to the family registry act do not ban kanji – Chinese-based characters in written Japanese – parents are required to inform local authorities of their phonetic reading, in an attempt to banish unusual or controversial pronunciations.
Someone in California had a vanity plate that read “NULL.” Turns out that’s where the state computer assigned traffic tickets where the license plate was unreadable, so he got a shedload, and it took him a lot of work to get that mess cleared up.
Null is also a German surname, so people who aren’t taking the piss get caught in problems due to stupid input validation and bad testing.