The wife and I have been thinking of names for our upcoming daughter and I really find female names in the language to be not as varied and meaningful as male names.
Somehow they are either quite old fashioned and sexist (ending with 子) or superficial and common in terms of the kanji options (美 etc) or just sound bad in English.
Anyone knows why and what to do about this?
3 comments
This sounds more like a you problem? I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically sexist about ‘子’ and it’s not exactly mandatory, you can use whatever kanji you want, and most female Japanese names work well in English (and sound, imo, far nicer than most male names).
Looking at the most popular names [here](https://pon-navi.net/nazuke/name/ranking/f/2021), most of them don’t have the problems you seem to be finding anyway.
because japanese culture has a lot of old fashioned and sexist elements to it? it’s certainly not the only culture that does so. and naming is certainly not the [only aspect of the culture](https://twitter.com/search?q=%23kutoo&src=typed_query) that is so. not sure there’s much “to be done” about it, at least for outsiders; it’s an issue that japanese citizens need to tackle for themselves. if that’s you, then just naming your child in a way different from this is a concrete thing that you can do, small as it might be, so go for it.
if you just want to select japanese women’s names without certain features, there are plenty without 子 or 美 in them. if searching is a problem, gimme a place where i can dump a huge list of women’s names and name the kanji you don’t want and i can text filter it for you if you want.
why a Japanese name? also they’re just names, they shouldn’t be all that meaningful in the first place, wanting names with an interesting meaning is quite old fashioned itself