Japanese Names

Before we begin on how to construct a Japanese name, we will need to discuss what Japanese use of Chinese characters (kanji) looks like, because we've added a step on top of name concepts from the mainland: multiple readings within one language.  Previously, we've discussed where you can look at one character as a speaker of say, Mandarin, and know the Mandarin way to say that word, and how to transcribe it in a phonetic writing because that's your language. If you're bilingual in Cantonese, you might also know how to transcribe that same character in a Cantonese phonetic system. It is in this sense that we use the term "reading" of a character. One character can have a Mandarin reading, and a Cantonese reading, Japanese reading, Korean reading, Vietnamese reading, et cetera. 

Now consider Japanese. Much like English has various loan words that came into use in various periods of contact with other languages, Japanese (and other languages in the region historically in contact with China) has many loan words from Chinese, but the words were loaned sometimes more than a thousand years ago, so don't match up with modern Mandarin Chinese, and even if they sound similar, they are being pronounced by Japanese speakers, not a Chinese language speaker.  Considering this, the most common way to explain it to English speakers is that there are different Japanese "readings" of a character.  Readings in this case are not different languages, but are all Japanese.  Possibly this is analogous to being able to tell when an English word derives from a Greek or a Latin origin, but no matter what it is still English, and which word of same/similar meaning is used depends on context. 

Reading a Kanji: Kun'yomi 訓読み and On'yomi 音読み

Here we will quote and paraphrase some information from this very well written explanation by Kristen Dexter for Tofugu.com.  I will add romanizations in brackets where they originally only had hiragana or katakana written. Note, Kristen Dexter uses kanji where I have been referring to them as Chinese characters.  

To start:

• On'yomi 音読み: Readings derived from the Chinese pronunciations. Can also be referred to as the Sino-Japanese reading.

• Kun'yomi 訓読み: The native Japanese readings. 

"Although most kanji have both an on'yomi and kun'yomi reading, there are exceptions. There are kanji that only have one or the other.  Kanji that only have an on'yomi reading are usually for things that either: Do not have a single, unified term (in Japanese), and thus took the Chinese reading for clarity, or…Were ideas or concepts that didn't yet exist for the Japanese people."

"As power in China changed, so did the "official" language.  These language shifts had a direct effect on the types of Chinese language that were brought to Japan. And not every kanji was brought over at the same time or from the same place."

"There were three major reading adoption periods in the history of the Japanese language:

• Go-on 呉音 (4–6th century): The Wu [呉] Dynasty pronunciation

• Kan-on 漢音 (7–9th century): The Han [漢] Dynasty pronunciation

• Tō-on 唐音 (1185–1573): The "Chinese" [唐 - Tang Dynasty] pronunciation"

Here you can already see how the Chinese characters are serving their purpose. To the left is the modern Japanese pronunciation, then the characters saying to us "dynasty name" + 音, which means "sound" and is pronounced with the Sino-Japanese "on" in this situation. You can see it is the same character that is used to write On'yomi as 音読み, which as said above means the imported Chinese readings from various stages.  "Yomi" (読み) is a the native Japanese preference for basically the same meaning of  "sound" or "reading [of a character]" but it is written with a different character, and pronounced with the native Japanese pronunciation. This is why I search through many words before settling on one because I want to see which ones are used in what contexts first, even if the meaning isn't necessarily wrong in a particular situation.

Back to the three on'yomi types: note that the dates in parentheses are when the pronunciation made it to Japan, and do not necessarily coincide with when these Chinese dynasties reigned. So you can see a bit of a lag in either information transmission, or that this is simply the time Japan classically associated with these pronunciations. 

Kristen Dexter goes on to elaborate: "The majority of the on'yomi readings we use today are from the Kan-on group[.] [...] [M]ost dictionaries make no mention of the origins of the on'yomi readings and simply list them all without any differentiation. [...] The two major Japanese-Japanese dictionaries (that I'm aware of) that do have this information are 新漢語林 and 新選漢和辞典. Some online Japanese dictionaries also list them for certain kanji, take this example of 明 in コトバンク:"