Last name into Kanji

[Daveyamf79 0]

Do any of you from Japan know any Kanji that sounds like "Jones" and has an acceptable meaning? My fiancee and I want to have her family name changed on her Koseki Touhon to Jones. (we would like to use Kanji, not Katakana).

[handor 0]

First, doesn't your fiancee already have some ideas about this? If she's Japanese, she can probably do better than I. That said, here's a stab at it.

I'm not an expert (being the American half of my K1 situation), but I do know my way around a fair amount of kanji. My guess is that the closest you could get would be by piecing together a JO or JOU, ON, and ZU.

It's made a bit more difficult because Japanese surnames use the KUNYOMI of kanji somewhat more than the Chinese ONYOMI. This makes the selection process a bit more difficult. Here's one possible formulation which gets close:

浄 JOU (onyomi) pure; clean.

奥 ON (onyomi) heart; interior.

津 ZU (kunyomi) port, harbor.

Perhaps better is to take a looser construction, which might make it sound slightly more authentically Japanese. Again, I'm no expert, but you could go with JO(U)-AN-ZU. In that case, you could take a real Japanese name JOU-AN and tack on 津 (ZU), which is frequently encountered in names. Here are a couple I'd recommend looking at:

1. 常安: You can find this on the web in name combinations 常安橋 JOUAN-BASHI and 常安寺 JOUAN-JI.

2. 浄安: This one also exists online, particularly in combination as 浄安寺 JOUAN-JI.

The full name would become:

1. 常安津 - Means something like "Port of continual peace/tranquility"

2. 浄安津 - Means something like "Port of pure (in the sense of clean) peace/tranquility"

Note that the translations are rough, and I wouldn't expect the meaning to be an enormous factor. After all, lots of Japanese surnames have meanings like "Dog Mountain" or "Black River".

Good luck!