Saki, Yoshi, and Shen... the confusion of names

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

Oroku Saki, Tang Shen, and Hamato Yoshi are all the core trinity of the TMNT origin. I've been doing a little digging, and I've only just realized just how inaccurate their names are. Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman REALLY didn't give ANY critical thought to the names at all.

Tang Shen... now, a lot of us already know that this is a Chinese name, not Japanese. But it turns out that "Shen" is actually a male name, not female. The female name closest to "Shen" is "Shan", which means coral. And looking for a female Japanese name that means coral, I came up with "Sango."

Well, what about Oroku Saki? The good news is, yes, Saki is a Japanese name. But it's a female Japanese name. (Oroku is also a Japanese name, so we don't have to worry about that.)

Hamato Yoshi? Yoshi is a Japanese male name meaning "good luck", "righteous", or "good." But Hamato? It doesn't even appear to be Asian, but Indian or Middle-Eastern.

All of my research took place in about fifteen minutes, so it's likely some of y'all can dig deeper and find out more. My personal curiosity has been satisfied... but man, this bugs me. :tlol:

[HotJuicyBurgers]

What if they were brand new names? It wouldn't ne unheard of. And a name can be both male and female names.

[turtlefanforever]

it's been discussed before. It doesn't bother me any. Considering we are watching/reading something about Ninja Turtles. The names sound good too.

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

What if they were brand new names? It wouldn't ne unheard of. And a name can be both male and female names.

Names can be used by either gender, but as a member of a different culture and language, I don't have any idea on if these names are the Eastern equivalents of "John" "Harry" and "Susan", or "Sam" "Casey" and "Jordan".

it's been discussed before. It doesn't bother me any. Considering we are watching/reading something about Ninja Turtles. The names sound good too.

They sound good, but we are Westerners (a majority of us, I'm assuming). I wonder how TMNT fans from Japan or China or Korea feel about the names?

It's totally nitpicking, but still... it's gonna bug me for a few days. :tlol:

[Candy Kappa]

The Japanese dub of the FW show renamed Hamato Yoshi and Oroku Saki to Yoshihama Takeshi and Oroku Sawaki which is more authentic names.

The are some gender neutral names in Japan, but Saki ain't one off them as its a very feminine name where 咲 (sa) means blossomand 希 (ki) is hope.

[neatoman]

I'm pretty sure Peter Laird explained him and Kevin pulled those names out of their asses, that's why they decided to give the turtles western names, you don't want your real main characters to run around with made-up names.

Anyway, I did find two instances of the name Saki being applied to men, a British author using it as a pseudonym and an American guitarist using it as a nickname. Though nobody using it as their real name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaki_Liu

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

The Japanese dub of the FW show renamed Hamato Yoshi and Oroku Saki to Yoshihama Takeshi and Oroku Sawaki which is more authentic names.

The are some gender neutral names in Japan, but Saki ain't one off them as its a very feminine name where 咲 (sa) means blossomand 希 (ki) is hope.

That's awesome.

And yeah, when I saw that Saki meant "tender blossom of hope", I pretty much lost it. :tlol::tlol::tlol:

[CyberCubed]

Keep in mind TMNT hit nearly 15 years before the anime craze infested America, and Peter Laird/Eastman obviously weren't too sure what Japanese names actually were.

One thing I love about TMNT is it pre-dates anime, or else the Turtles would have probably been given Japanese names instead of European ones. I think I remember Eastman saying the Turtles weren't given Asian names because he thought they would be "too weird" for Americans to pronounce.

Imagine if Leo's name was, "Akira" and Raphael's name was "Yoshimitsu?" I mean Peter and Kevin grew up in the 70's and 80's way before the anime craze infested America in the late 90's and early 2000's. If PL/Kevin were born two decades later TMNT would have likely been heavily anime inspired.

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

Keep in mind TMNT hit nearly 15 years before the anime craze infested America, and Peter Laird/Eastman obviously weren't too sure what Japanese names actually were.

One thing I love about TMNT is it pre-dates anime, or else the Turtles would have probably been given Japanese names instead of European ones. I think I remember Eastman saying the Turtles weren't given Asian names because he thought they would be "too weird" for Americans to pronounce.

Imagine if Leo's name was, "Akira" and Raphael's name was "Yoshimitsu?" I mean Peter and Kevin grew up in the 70's and 80's way before the anime craze infested America in the late 90's and early 2000's. If PL/Kevin were born two decades later TMNT would have likely been heavily anime inspired.

I've never watched a single episode of anime, and I can find all this out without using the internet.

Baby name books, man... they're a godsend to authors.

[IndigoErth]

Blossom of hope. Well, Shredder, is it safe to say you did not turn out in any way that your parents had wished for? :tlol:

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

Blossom of hope. Well, Shredder, is it safe to say you did not turn out in any way that your parents had wished for? :tlol:

Mr. and Mrs. Oroku just wanted a baby girl... :tcry: If Nagi had had a little sister, none of this tragedy would have ever happened! :tlol:

[Candy Kappa]

I think it would have been pretty cool if a future incarnation had a woman Saki.

[plastroncafe]

Keep in mind TMNT hit nearly 15 years before the anime craze infested America, and Peter Laird/Eastman obviously weren't too sure what Japanese names actually were.

One thing I love about TMNT is it pre-dates anime, or else the Turtles would have probably been given Japanese names instead of European ones. I think I remember Eastman saying the Turtles weren't given Asian names because he thought they would be "too weird" for Americans to pronounce.

Imagine if Leo's name was, "Akira" and Raphael's name was "Yoshimitsu?" I mean Peter and Kevin grew up in the 70's and 80's way before the anime craze infested America in the late 90's and early 2000's. If PL/Kevin were born two decades later TMNT would have likely been heavily anime inspired.

If only Japanese Culture had existed prior to the popularization of Anime in American Culture...

Eastman and Laird were two white guys from New England who thought kung fu movies were cool.
Their knowledge of Japanese Culture and Heritage was limited...way limited.
I would say bordering on Orientalism levels of limited.

[BubblyShell22]

I laughed when I read what Saki's name means. Yep, he's definitely not what his parents wanted.

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

In some future incarnation of the Turtles, I want them all facing him in combat. Saki tries to entice them to join the Foot... and Mikey just says,

"Wait wait wait a minute... Oroku Saki? Dude, Splinter totally taught us Japanese. Your name is Tender Blossom of Hope!?"

And Shredder then proceeds to absolutely flip his lid. :tlol:

[Powder]

Your name is Tender Blossom of Hope!?


http://i59.tinypic.com/seue7m.gif

[CyberCubed]

If only Japanese Culture had existed prior to the popularization of Anime in American Culture...

Eastman and Laird were two white guys from New England who thought kung fu movies were cool.
Their knowledge of Japanese Culture and Heritage was limited...way limited.
I would say bordering on Orientalism levels of limited.

Before anime, the only Asian culture in the U.S. were Bruce Lee films of the 70's, Chinese restaurants, and "Everyone is Kung Fu fighting, these dudes are fast as lightning!"

That's why TMNT was such a game changer. It was rooted in Japanese backstory but was an American creation and came in the mid-80's when this was all new and fresh. If TMNT was created in 2000 for example I doubt it would have made as much impact because kids were all into anime then. Its probably why TMNT 2k3 also didn't get as high ratings as it should of because it aired in that particular time period.

[Prowler]

It's kinda funny how unfamiliar and exotic the Japanese culture seemed back in the FW series days. Like the Turtles reaction to Sushi, per example. Sushi seems to be the hip food for middle-class people in their 20s nowadays. When was the last time you've heard someone calling it "gross, not even on pizza!"?

[Cipher]

This honestly bugs the sh*t out of me, and is just something you have to ignore it as an artifact of Eastman and Laird's incomplete research when writing the first issue. Also their not imagining that they were creating anything more than a one-off pastiche.

I'd be all for a new version pulling some name swaps for the sake of believably, though.

Baby name books, man... they're a godsend to authors.
While you won't find a bigger proponent of baby-name and name-meaning websites for fiction than me, I'm not sure it would have been all that easy to track down baby names for foreign cultures in the 1980s. Granted, I'm sure they still could have found some authentic names, but ... one-off pastiche.

I take a bit more umbrage with IDW not changing Tang Shen's name while setting her story in feudal, incredibly jingoistic Japan. That ... that is dumb, and isn't an artifact worth preserving. (Though IDW being infected with unnecessary nods to previous versions at the expense of its own world is one of my central frustrations with the book.)

[CyberCubed]

You guys do realize in 1984 the internet did not exist, right? I think a lot of you are forgetting that most people had no idea what was going on in the outside world outside of the local news and newspapers.

Its not like Peter Laird could go on google and type in Japanese names back in 1984.

[Cipher]

You guys do realize in 1984 the internet did not exist, right? I think a lot of you are forgetting that most people had no idea what was going on in the outside world outside of the local news and newspapers.

Its not like Peter Laird could go on google and type in Japanese names back in 1984.
That's exactly what I just said.

Still, it should've been possible to find some, though likely not an entire baby book, with a library visit or two. Worth the effort for the kind of comic they were making? Maybe, maybe not.

[plastroncafe]

They could have gone to the library.
If they were serious about making an accurate portrayal of Japanese feudal culture, and not a white guy 80s parody of it, they could have.
We went to the moon with less computer power than the average person has in their smartphones today.

Please stop perpetuating the notion that the world was a desert of knowledge prior to the mainstream access to the internet.

Hell, I found Mirage Studio's address via the card catalog at my local library, back when most Apple IIEs needed a cartridge to load a CD ROM.

They didn't do the research because they didn't felt they had to.
Because this was a joke between two white guys who didn't know any better.

[CyberCubed]

Did libraries even have that kind of foreign information though? Even then what you would find in the 80's was probably outdated encyclopedias from a decade ago or whatever.

Granted I haven't been to a library since I was like 13 because god bless the internet, so I have no idea what's there anymore.

[Cipher]

Perhaps it should be pointed out that these guys also managed to misspell f*cking "Michelangelo," so let's not make too many excuses for them on the research front.

Re: Cubed, a little MA library probably wouldn't have had an entire book of Japanese names, but it almost certainly would've had some text they could pull three names from.

[plastroncafe]

Cyber, just when I think you can't possibly shock me with your ignorance...you do and then some.

Yes. Yes it would have been possible to find information about Japan, and about Japanese Culture, and Japanese names at the public library. And yes in the 1980s. You know we did have Japanese people living in the United States in the 1980s too.

They were lazy, stoner, slacker Art Students dicking around while watching television.

Just as a point of order Cipher, it would have been a New Hampshire library, because they were living in Dover at the time.
And secondly, North Hampton has some really freaking famous universities around it.

[Xav]

They were lazy, stoner, slacker Art Students dicking around while watching television.I don't know if they were lazy, stoner, slackers, they did put a whole comic together, and Eastman claims there were no drugs involved.

[Prowler]

Eastman and Laird did a very poor research of Japanese culture, yes. They gave Shredder a girl's name(although some Japanese names are gender-neutral, dunno if Saki's the case...) and inaccurately depicted Ninjas. I don't thin kit's much of a farfetched excuse that it wasn't that easy to access data back then... but Hergé, a Belgian author, was pretty accurate with his depictions of different people and cultures(except for Tintin in Congo and The Blue Lotus which are quite racist...). And he was drawing comics back in the 40s, 50s and 60s. I bet it was waaaaaaay harder for him to do some proper research back then than it was for Eastman and laird in the 80s.

It doesn't bother me much, anyway, since I've never seen the TMNT as a guide for Japanese culture; but if I was an author, I'd try to do some proper research. Especially if I want to depict something accurately. I guess Eastman and Laird just didn't care much about an accurate portrayal of the Japanese culture and Ninjas in their work. And I can see why some people would be disappointed and upset about it. One of my least FW episodes was the one they went to Lisbon, Portugal. Nothing in it was accurate. It's like they initially wanted to set the episode in Pamplona, Spain; but for some reason decided to switch location in the last minute. Inaccurately representations of culture in the media can be pretty damaging considering the media is a powerful force that can really shape people's minds.

[CyberCubed]

Kevin Eastman didn't know anything about Japan beyond Bruce Lee films. I mean these were two white men in the mid 80's, what did anyone know about Asian culture back then beyond karate, sushi, and Chinese take out?

[MsMarvelDuckie]

Sweet Mother, Cubed, it's NOT that hard to do a little research! My local library has SEVERAL books on Japan and it's history and culture, which all include REAL Japanese names- and most of those books are older than TMNT. Not to mention there are books on martial arts, too. In fact, it's not hard to find books on either subject. It would've been even easier back then, given that libraries devoted more of their space and budgets to actual BOOKS, unlike today where nearly half the space is for computer use.


Also, Bruce Lee was not Japanese, nor did he use karate. Geez, at least get THAT part right, would ya?! (And AFAIK, his movies were mostly set and/or made in China or Hong Kong, not Japan.) Gah, now I'm correcting Cubed- how did it come to this?! :teek::trolleye::trazz::tgrumble:

[Prowler]

Kevin Eastman didn't know anything about Japan beyond Bruce Lee films. I mean these were two white men in the mid 80's, what did anyone know about Asian culture back then beyond karate, sushi, and Chinese take out?
Well, ye, like I've said, they could have put more effort into it, but I don't really blame them either since it wasn't that easy to make some deep research back then as it is today.

[Cipher]

Just as a point of order Cipher, it would have been a New Hampshire library, because they were living in Dover at the time.
And secondly, North Hampton has some really freaking famous universities around it.
Fair points, but I disagree because this is the Internet and I will not concede!

[Candy Kappa]

and Eastman claims there were no drugs involved.

There was probably a couple off sandwiches involved :lol:

http://i.imgur.com/ukBByJ3.jpg

[plastroncafe]

If this thread has shown us anything, it's that you can have home access to the internet and STILL not know anything about Japanese Culture and Heritage.

Maybe...visiting a library might help. Where one could go up to any librarian and say:
Gosh, I'm writing a story about three Japanese people and need help finding names.

[HotJuicyBurgers]

As was mentioned before, I don't think Kevin and Peter bothered doing much research because they really didn't think much of the "future" of the book. I'm sure if they had planned on making a whole series they would have done more research, but I also don't think the first book would have been as awesome as it is if they had done so much planning. If they were creating the a series, in the first issue, almost certainly no action would have occurred, just setting up story and characters.

[Wolfie65]

To their credit, Eastman & Laird have admitted that everything they 'knew' about martial arts, Japanese culture/language/mythology, Ninjitsu, etc. came from Kung Fu movies, so why should the 'Japanese' names they came up with be any more authentic?
And yes, verifying how real a made-up foreign name is would have been difficult in the pre-internet 1980's, so they just wrote something that sounded cool to them, the end.
Hollywoodland is chock full to the gills of German, French, Chinese, Scandinavian and other non-Anglo words and names no one in those respective cultures would even recognize.

[Panda_Kahn_fan]

I know this is an old thread, but...

Personally, I'd just make shredder's name actually be Oroku Sawaki, like they did in Japan. The TMNT just call him Saki just to annoy him over the 'delicate flower' bit. As for Tang Shen, I've said in other threads that she could either be in Japan as a migrant worker, or be the daughter of a Chinese merchant (depending on if she's feudal or modern). There are ways to work around this stuff.

[CylonsKlingonsDaleksOhMy]

I know this is an old thread, but...

Personally, I'd just make shredder's name actually be Oroku Sawaki, like they did in Japan. The TMNT just call him Saki just to annoy him over the 'delicate flower' bit. As for Tang Shen, I've said in other threads that she could either be in Japan as a migrant worker, or be the daughter of a Chinese merchant (depending on if she's feudal or modern). There are ways to work around this stuff.

Good ideas. :tgrin:

[ssjup81]

I know this is an old thread, but...

Personally, I'd just make shredder's name actually be Oroku Sawaki, like they did in Japan. The TMNT just call him Saki just to annoy him over the 'delicate flower' bit. As for Tang Shen, I've said in other threads that she could either be in Japan as a migrant worker, or be the daughter of a Chinese merchant (depending on if she's feudal or modern). There are ways to work around this stuff.The recent Nick ep did a decent job regarding Tang Shen. At least they acknowledged that she was part Chinese or whatever.

[Bombshell]

No wonder Shredder has an angry

[Xav]

Personally, I'd just make shredder's name actually be Oroku Sawaki, like they did in Japan. The TMNT just call him Saki just to annoy him over the 'delicate flower' bit.What about calling "Hamato Yoshi" "Hamada Yoshi"?

[TheLabRat]

As for Tang Shen, I've said in other threads that she could either be in Japan as a migrant worker, or be the daughter of a Chinese merchant (depending on if she's feudal or modern). There are ways to work around this stuff.

I do have an idea, Tang Shen's family bloodline come from Tang Sect. Tang Sect is a school of assassins in several works of chinese wuxia fiction. They specialized in poisons and hidden weapon. Tang Shen has no talent, and her kindness does not allow it, but her sister, Tang Amaya has talented and willing to learn.