Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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UrsusArctos
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Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby UrsusArctos » Thu Jun 03, 2021 1:21 am

I popped back from my time away from the forum because I came across something interesting - Asuka seems to have gotten a canonical Kanji name in Episode 26. Whether this is an oversight by the animators, or simply applicable to the AU sequence that it is part of (complete with RIAO, mama Yui and teacher Misato) or meant to be canonical in some form is something I'm not sure of. Asuka's given name, whether the Soryu or Shikinami version of her character, has always been given in Katakana as アスカ. So seeing her name rendered as 明日香 under the scratched-out "umbrella of love" was a real surprise for me.

Image

明日香 has the characters for "bright,light,understanding";"day,sun,date"; "fragrant incense,savory(food)" respectively and is a common Kanji rendering of "Asuka" for feminine names. It's also the same rendering of Asuka as Saki Asuka in Shinji Wada's manga Cho-Shoujo Asuka (超少女明日香), which is where Anno borrowed Asuka's and Kyoko's names.

(For those of you wondering, Shinji's name is simply written as "Ikari" - "anchor", so we don't get any Kanji for シンジ)
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Re: Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby Lavinius » Thu Jun 03, 2021 2:47 am

This is interesting. Eva's insistence on giving the characters exclusively katakana given names has always puzzled me, since every other anime/manga I know of has no problem providing kanji when applicable. In Crying Man Reichu has this be an intentional feature of the worldbuilding- an alternate history difference in post-WWII orthographic policy.
Looking at this it seems as though the intention is that kanji in first names were officially abolished for some reason after 2I (or earlier), but were retained in Shinji's fantasy AU.

It's worth adding that these are the same kanji that the Chinese translations have assigned her.
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Re: Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby Zusuchan » Thu Jun 03, 2021 3:12 am

This is a good find indeed.

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Re: Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby UrsusArctos » Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:08 am

Glad you agree. I've made a note of it in the wiki.

View Original PostLavinius wrote:This is interesting. Eva's insistence on giving the characters exclusively katakana given names has always puzzled me, since every other anime/manga I know of has no problem providing kanji when applicable.


This seems to be Anno's way of allowing for complex wordplay, in the same way that the "Shin" in "Shin Godzilla" and "Shin Evangelion" is written in Katakana and allows for multiple meanings. There's more than one set of Kanji for "Shinji" or "Asuka" and some of those Kanji have entirely different meanings. Reichu's in-universe explanation in Crying Man is as good as they come, and I see the logic behind your suggestion for the AU. Nevertheless, I'm curious about this particular exception to the Katakana rule, it's pretty darn mystifying. I wonder if there's an ironic joke in having Asuka, the most obviously foreign of all the main characters, having the most traditionally Japanese name?

It's worth adding that these are the same kanji that the Chinese translations have assigned her.


From a cursory glance at the list of Asukas on wikipedia, 明日香 really is a very common rendering - likely the most common rendering - of "Asuka", so it would have been a logical choice for the Chinese translators to use, common enough that they need not have asked Anno and co. for help with its choice. Of course, if it was provided by Anno at the behest of the Chinese translators, that'd be an entirely different story, but I have no idea how to find that out.

Of course, we do have an alternative -
https://wiki.evageeks.org/FGC:Episode_26_Cut_259
If someone has the script at hand and can translate the script comments for this shot, we may have an answer about why her name's in kanji.
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Re: Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby dzzthink » Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:41 pm

You can see Shinji's Kanji name as well in the picture "碇"真嗣. Kanji uses the same character symbols as the Chinese language, which is why the Chinese translations use the Kanji name. Not sure at what point these Kanji names were developed though. I'm pretty sure there might be some transliteration.
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Re: Canonical Kanji for Asuka's name?

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Postby UrsusArctos » Thu Jun 03, 2021 9:56 pm

Only the "碇" - "Ikari" part is written, there's no "真嗣" (Shinji). Chinese characters and Kanji are not entirely identical, since there are a number of simplified forms in Chinese that don't exist in Kanji and there are a number of Kanji that don't have equivalent Chinese characters.
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The main point of idiocy is for the smart to have their lulz. Without human idiocy, trolling would not exist, and that's uncool, since a large part of my entertainment consists of mocking the absurdity and dumbassery of the world, especially the Internet.-MaggotMaster


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