Ichiro's name: We stand corrected!
We received word from a reader of this blog that a previous post about baseball superstar Ichiro contained an error: It turns out that Ichiro isn't his parents' eldest son; he's a second son. We based our assumption about Ichiro's birth order on other families we know where the eldest son is named Ichiro (which means "first boy") and the second-oldest is named Jiro ("second boy"). So the rule doesn't hold up all the time.
Still, what makes Japanese names so interesting is that they all have a meaning that's apparent in the kanji (Chinese characters) in which they're written.
