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

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:

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

yeah
 

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.

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".

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:

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.

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

That's awesome.

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

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.

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:

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

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.

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

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:

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.

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!"?

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.

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.)

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.