For people planning to live in Japan, here’s some advice that will save you hours and hours of frustration (For those that are currently in Japan it may already be too late so you can skip this). It has to do with writing your name. There are two issues I will briefly address here:

Name in Katakana:
Katakana is the syllabic alphabet mostly used for foreign loan words and in furigana to help Japanese people pronounce kanji and non-Japanese words, like your name. When you come to Japan you will no doubt be introduced to the wonderful world of Japanese paperwork where you will have to write your name and address and phone number a gzillion times just to do something simple like buy bread (ok exaggeration). This includes writing your name in katakana. The challenge occurs when you have a name that can have a number of permutations when written in katakana. For example, I’ve seen people write “David” as デービッド or ダーヴィド or デーブ etc. Or a name that might sound like something else. E.G. My friend Deb insisted on everyone calling her Deb which would be written as デブ which means “fat”. I suggested Debbie or Debra but she was stubborn. Oh well. It’s a good idea to decide on one version of your name and use that consistently since this is usually what many programs searching and sorting databases use. If you have inconsistent versions of your name you may end up in a pinch when someone is trying to transfer much needed cash to your bank account and keeps getting your name wrong. It has happened to me several times, although the reasons were usually related to the next issue rather then with the kana version of my name. Look for the official katakana versions of famous celebrities that have the same name as you and see how they have written it. This is similar in a way to how there are so many different, dare I say “English,” versions of Chinese last names. When some Chinese immigrated to North America and they had to spell their surname using the alphabet, depending on their pronunciation the immigration officer spelled it differently, thus creating a whole bunch of versions of names which in fact were actually the same. I imagine this happened with other cultures as well.

Order of your name:
This is the one that has caused me so many headaches. Some application forms spilt your name into two parts, Last Name and First Name. Others do not. When the form only has one space for name, I used what I thought was the default order which was First Name, Last Name. After so many years, and hundreds of places where I had registered my name, this began to cause serious problems, especially when dealing with the government or financial institutions. This hit me hard recently when I purchased my house and I had to provide lots and lots of documentation from the ward office as well as from the bank and so forth. And then more problems when trying to change my address with credit card companies and utilities etc. The problem occurs when you have to provide some ID with your name on it, like your passport of gaijin card. If the name order is different from what’s on your proof of identity then the problems occur. Generally, they’ll just ask you to rewrite your application which doesn’t seem like a big deal until you have dozens of forms to redo where you have to lookup all kinds of other info that you don’t have on hand, like the addresses and phone numbers of the last five places you worked and lived. The best thing to do is to use Last Name first and First Name last as there will be times when this order is mandatory. That way you’ll never be confused.

I wrote this very quickly and half asleep so don’t flame me if I missed out on some details…