A basic guide to using Asian names

I have a Indonesian Chinese friend who has strange name. She said her parents made up her name preventing the massacre against Chinese.

In south Indian names:

> Initials are often used to shorten the name.

A fun complication to this is that the initial may be more than one letter in English, taking the first consonant as it is in the source language (which uses an alphasyllabary), which may correspond to more than one letter in the Latin script; for example, “Ch. Naveen”.

The guidance on Japanese names is a bit simplistic. Yes, the Japanese government has announced a surname-first policy, but Japanese people are not bound by that policy. I have hundreds of name cards (meishi) that I have received from Japanese businesspeople, academics, and government officials over the years, and my rough estimate is that more than half who indicated their name in English on the card put their surname last.

For more nuanced guidelines, I recommend the Japan Style Sheet published by the Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators in Tokyo. It can be downloaded for free at [1]. An excerpt:

“Japanese write their names in their own language surname first, as do Chinese and Koreans. After contact with the West was reestablished in the mid-nineteenth century, many Japanese adopted the practice of giving their surname last in international contexts. Japanese learn in school to reverse their names when writing or speaking in English and their domestic English-language media follow this practice, as do almost all other media around the world. Especially in translations, either name order may be adopted. Writers and editors may also choose a hybrid approach.” (p. 37)

[1] https://japanstylesheet.com/download-jss/

Westernized Chinese names seem to be missing. For example, in Hong Kong it's common to have both Chinese and Western first names. This leads to a complex rule:

Using the Western name only: WESTERN-FIRST CHINESE-LAST

Using the Chinese name only: CHINESE-LAST CHINESE-FIRST

Using both: WESTERN-FIRST CHINESE-LAST CHINESE-FIRST

(CHINESE-FIRST can be one or two characters). I think I got that right?

That seems more like an abbreviation, like English titles such as “Mr.” and “Mrs.”?