Aoi Terasaka

Lynn M. Raymond
UWRT 1102
20 January 2015
Writing Prompt #2
I remembered that my mother named me and there was a reason why she named me
Aoi as
my first name. Unfortunately it was a long time ago so I do not remember that reason so I
asked my
mother again to write this writing prompt. My name Aoi was name from a flower Aoi
which is
hollyhock in English. In Japan, hollyhock is known as the leaves of hollyhock follow the sun
like
sunflowers and the language of flower of hollyhock is fruitfulness or ambition. Therefore my
mother
hoped I would follow great ambition to be a powerful woman.
Then I started exploring the history of my last name and found out there is an
unique culture
of naming system in Japan. As many people know, there were Samurai in Japan few
hundreds ago
and warlord reigned whole country until mid-17 th century. At that time not everyone allowed
to have
their own last name. Only people who were the nobles or Samurai allowed to have it. Once
Samurai
society was gone and democracy was introduced to Japan, then everybody allowed to have
their own
last name. However there were so many people did not have last name so that they had no
idea how they
named their last name. Therefore most of people named their last name based on where they
were living.
For example, someone who lived close to liver used the letter (which means liver in
Japanese) or

someone who was working at rice padding used (which means rice padding in Japanese)
for their
last name.
Before I explored these histories of last name in Japan, I thought last name which is
now
popular in Japan has longer history than some other last names which are unique or only few
family use.
However, because so many people created their last name almost at the same time, some
people
accidentally used same last name so that it made some last name so popular in Japan now. My
mothers
last name before she got married was Kikuchi ( in Japanese letter) and it is quite popular
last name
in Japan. But unlike my expectation that my ancestor named that last name based on where
they lived,
Kikuchi was passed through from the long time ago that Samurai society was still existed.
Based on my
research for the family tree project, my ancestor was originally from north side of Japan.
However their
last name, Kikuchi was originally from more south side of Japan where the Samurai who
named
Kikuchi ruled.
This writing prompt realized me there are so many things I did not know about
Japan and its
culture even though I have learned Japanese history in school and it was interesting to know
the things I
did not know. Therefore exploring the history of my last name motivated me to go further
look into my
family project.