jan left a comment a couple of weeks ago (sorry jan!) that i meant to answer but since i haven't been blogging much, i haven't got to it yet. she noticed that i call saori 'sasha' and wanted to know if it was a nickname. yes, it is.

giving hiroyuki his name was hard. we had decided on giving our child a japanese name, not a made up one (you know, finding kanji for an english name). because of japanese rules, i didn't want his japanese documents to have his english name (i had already decided on james) because it would have looked stupid. his english name is only on his american documents. anyway, we had a lot of difficulty, because of all the names i've come across while teaching and the bad associations i've made with them. finally, i told yoshi that i liked the name hiroyuki. apparently, yoshi thought that that was the name i wanted, no discussion. and, it turns out it's yoshi's uncle's name! by the time i had found that out, though, we had told more than one person that would be his name, and yoshi didn't want to change it. however, yoshi claimed that i chose hiro's name and he got to choose the next baby's name...

boys were hard, but girls names were hard, too. again, there were many names i didn't want to use because of all the students i had taught. one name i did like, however, was shiori. i told yoshi it was just a name i liked, not one we had to use. from there yoshi looked up the kanjis, but he didn't like any for shiori. but he did like the name saori. i liked it, and i never had a student with that name, so it was great! but...as i began to say the name to myself, i realized it sounded a lot like 'sorry', which would not be a good name for a kid if we ever moved back home. instead of going back to the drawing board, however, i started to think of nicknames. in japan, it's quite possible she would be called 'sa-chan', which sounds a lot like 'sasha' to me. and then i found the perfect nickname: sasha. i ran it by a couple of friends and they loved it. even yoshi likes it. and it's so easy for hiro to say (something i hadn't thought about before, but it's an added bonus for sure!)

please feel free to call her sasha!