Kanji use in NJPW

4 comments

1. That’s not kanji, it’s katakana, one of Japanese’s two syllabic character sets. (The last three characters on the top line are actually kanji, which are symbolic rather than sound-based, so can be read many different ways.)

   As for the difference you ask about, it seems like Japanese wrestlers get to choose how to render their names. Hence BUSHI and SHO use romaji (a/k/a the Western alphabet), Okada uses katakana for some reason I’m not sure about, and Naito and Tanahashi use kanji. Foreign wrestlers almost always have their names rendered phonetically in katakana. TJP is an exception, because its an initialism and trying to render that phonetically would result in something six to nine characters long, which would kinda defeat the purpose. The same went for ACH back when he wrestled in BOSJ.

   EDIT: This actually led me to a hilarious bit of confusion during the first BOSJ show – Kevin Knight’s name in katakana is displayed as “ナイト,” which phonetically is actually “NAITO.” And when I saw it I had a moment of, “Wait a minute, since when does Tetsuya Naito compete in Best of the Super Juniors?!” Derp…

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3. I believe it would be because some names and syllables don’t have an actual Kanji assignment for them, just like many languages have very specific terms that are the same over all languages.

4. Thats not kanji, its katakana.