by Marianne Kimura

Looking lost, my husband wanders outside with a wet rag he’d just used to clean the bathroom sink.

I pop my head out of the window.

“Otoosan”, I say, “hang it over there near the washing machine, near the other rags. When there’s more, I’ll wash them all together”.

As I close the window, it occurs to me, not for the first time, how odd it still feels to keep calling my husband the Japanese equivalent of “Dad”. But I’ve been doing that ever since our first child was born around 26 years ago! I’ve gotten so used to it, yet also, it does still occur to me that it seems strange.

Of course, I know that it’s common for older couples with kids here in Japan to call each other “Otoosan” (Dad) and “Okaasan” (Mom) while younger couples with kids typically prefer the more modern “Papa” and “Mama”. When our daughter was born, we were living in the smallest prefectural capital in a rural and very traditional part of western Japan, Yamaguchi. I’d often hear women in my neighborhood sing out “Otoosan!” when they were calling their husbands. Or I would hear them in shops: “Otoosan, look at how cheap these apples are today!” At first it seemed awkward to me, but soon I got totally used to it. It’s true, though, that I didn’t hear the reverse as much, the men calling “Okaasan” to their wives. I put it down to men’s naturally being less talkative. And also, I’ve sometimes heard men here calling their wives by nicknames, such as “Mi-chan” for “Miwako”.

I remember learning that calling your spouse—or indeed anyone―by his or her first name is kind of bad luck here so obviously I didn’t want to call my husband by his first name, Takeshi. I noticed that his family members mostly called him “Take-chan”. For a few years, before our daughter was born, I tried that for a while too, (my husband seemed amused by this), but that seemed strange to me as well. We’d lived in Chicago for four years before we’d moved to Japan, so I was quite used to calling him “Takeshi”. But when we moved here and I heard that using first names with your spouse was perhaps bringing bad luck, calling him “Takeshi” suddenly seemed like not only a brazen flouting of cultural norms, but possibly an invitation to disaster.

So, when our daughter was born, it was a relief to turn to the safe term “Otoosan”, and later, when I heard younger couples using “Mama” and “Papa”, perhaps I felt outdated, but I didn’t mind.

Still, I can’t help but feel, as a foreigner, maybe a little self-conscious still, about calling my husband “Otoosan”, which after all means “Dad”.

So what does my husband call me? Usually it’s, yes, “Okaasan”. But occasionally he will use my name, Marianne. Perhaps he’s not as superstitious as me? Or perhaps, as I’m a foreigner, there’s not so much bad luck attached to my name?

Now that having kids has become rarer in Japan, I’m also curious about what younger married couples would call each other since they might not ever become “Mama” and “Papa”. I feel like the answer is nicknames.

I investigated the topic of “bad luck surrounding first names in Japan” by asking my husband. He said that traditionally when kids were young, it was considered bad luck to use their first names because they still belonged partly to the spirit world, and using their real names could function somehow to call them back there.

Still, I remember clearly reading (but I don’t remember where) that it is even bad luck for a wife to call her husband by his first name. But is this merely an “old wives’ tale?”

And now so much water has gone by under the bridge, as they say, that I can’t call him “Takeshi” naturally any longer!

Here is what I found on Quora about this topic. The answer is written by a Japanese man in his 50s:

My mother still refers to my father by our surname when she is talking to her friends or siblings.

Among ourselves, she calls him “Granddad” and me “Eldest Bro.” Within a family, we call each other by our roles from the viewpoint of the youngest member. When I was a kid, they would call each other “Dad” and “Mom” respectively, and now “Granddad” and “Grandma” from the viewpoint of my kids. I had two younger brothers so hence “Eldest Bro” even now.

So, in a nutshell, Japanese people avoid using their first names by any means. It’s almost like an obsession, on par with those wizards at Hogwarts against calling the noseless villain his name. My uneducated guess is that it has something to do with the culture’s strong propensity for high-context indirectness mixed with a sense of deity that we associate with people’s names.

The samurai class of old days had this unique tradition where they gave children “childhood names” that were exclusively used until they finished coming-of-age ceremony (genpuku) and were granted a real adulthood name. The childhood name was for protecting children from the evil, while the adulthood name was treated as a sort of taboo, and it was not supposed to be mentioned until after the person was deceased.

I believe there was a similar “taboo name” culture in China, too.[1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-it-common-for-Japanese-girls-to-call-guys-by-their-first-name

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For other writings by Marianne Kimura on the Writers in Kyoto website, please see here. Marianne also has a sizable following on TikTok, describing herself as a Shakespeare performer and academic witch, and can be found under the name uguisu77.