jmoiron.net

My cat's name was Honda. My family got him about the same week as we got a similarly colored Honda Civic, and decided to name him that. This past week, he started to refuse food. The veterinarian said that his chest cavity was full of fluid and that multiple terminal problems were likely, so on Monday my parents and brother spent one last hour with him and then had him put to sleep. It was probably the right thing to do, since they said he was suffering pretty badly, but I can't help but think that he probably didn't see it coming.

His name in Japanese is 本田, the first kanji being pronounced 'hon' (like 'hone' but a shorter n) and the second 'da' (the 'a' is similar to the 2nd 'a' in 'grandma'). These are both extremely important and common kanji, and their derived radicals are pretty prevalant. The name means 'base of the rice field'. To get a little feel for how important they are, the name for "Japan" is 日本, which means 'sun base' (you've all heard 'land of the rising sun'), the kanji for "body" is 体, whose radicals are 'human' and 'base', and the kanji for 'male' 男 depicts a person in a rice field. 田, usually pronounced 'da' or 'ta', is extremely common in many surnames due to the importance of rice (and agriculture) to Japanese culture. It's even present in the kanji for 'cat', 猫, whose radicals mean roughly 'animal among the seeds' (plant above, rice field below in the tsukuri or right side radical).

So it turns out that this was a pretty good name (for both a car and a cat, I suppose). He was aloof and cool and catlike, but had a loyal streak to him. Members of my family that associated animals with filth eventually changed their mind.