The first Japanese to set foot in Norwich were the Japanese acrobats of the Royal Tycoon Troupe, in 1869. Their struggles over how to spell their names in English, whether to switch to an English name and what to name their children will be familiar to anyone who has tried to settle in another country and wrestle with how far to integrate and how far to be proud of their own identity.
When I returned to the UK from five years in Japan, at the age of eleven, I started at a girls’ private school in Bristol. Despite the fact that many of the girls were boarders with parents living overseas, the constant need to explain myself led to chants of “Pernille-it’s-Danish!” in the playground and remarks that I looked a bit Japanese – despite my fair hair and blue eyes.
It was even worse at the state co-ed middle school I moved to a year or so later, when my schoolmates discovered that not only did I have a funny name, but as a result of only speaking English to my parents for the five years we lived in Japan, I didn’t know any swear words or have any understanding of British popular culture.
At least in Japan I looked foreign, so there was no expectation I should have a “normal” name. Two “l’s” and one unpronounced “r” made my first name even more daunting for Japanese people, so we picked “pa-ni-ra” as being the most pronounceable Japanized version of my name. To this day I sometimes add, “like the ice cream, but with a pa” when I introduce myself to Japanese people – as it sounds very like vanilla in Japanese – ba-ni-ra.
I have been called Vanilla in the UK too – along with Fenella, Prunella, Priscilla, Penelope, Camilla and even Gorilla. My family call me Pille, because one of my friends in England, when I was six, before we moved to Japan, could only pronounce it that way. Chinese colleagues have also baulked at pronouncing my name, so we agreed they could call me Pearl.
My surname, Rudlin, contains even more l’s and r’s, and ends up being pronounced ra-do-rin in Japanese. When I was living in Japan with my mother and stepfather, it was decided I should adopt my stepfather’s surname, Hughes, which was much easier to pronounce (hyuu-zu) and avoided having to explain about my mother’s divorce.
When I returned to the UK, I initially went by the name of Pernille Rudlin-Hughes – making me even more of a target for being posh, in combination with my first name ending in an “ah” sound. It was too long to fit on the programme of a terrible school play I was in (where I played Chairman Mao – Chinese, Japanese, all the same anyway) so I decided to drop the Hughes – reasoning that plain Rudlin was my legal name anyway.
This caused one of those family rows which never quite heal. It seemed I was publicly rejecting my stepfather. Perhaps I was – but the feminist in me also hesitates to see fighting to retain my father’s name as a victory for control over my own identity.
Names and class, slaves and servants
I later became interested in the roots of the Rudlin name (hitting a genealogical brick wall somewhere near Norwich in the 1780s as they were illiterate carpenters) and it has become my professional name and the name of my company. I did not change it when I married either, so my husband often has to answer to Mr Rudlin.
Being obviously white and with a middle-class accent, my experience was more low-level bullying rather than the oppression and discrimination suffered by those who have roots in African American slave families, or whose families came from former British colonies. Just as the British upper classes had standard names that they called their servants, regardless of their real names, so British and American slave masters would give their slaves English first names or mocking names such as Caesar or King George. Slaves were also often given their slave master’s surname as their own surname.
Actually Pernille is a servant’s name too. It means no more than the female form of Peter in Danish. My mother chose it because of a cheeky soubrette maid character in the 18th century Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg’s plays such as Masquerade, Henrik and Pernille and Pernille’s Brief Experience as a Lady.
If people of black or Asian ethnicity revert to or use the names of their cultural origins, they have to suffer the inability of white indigenous groups to make the effort to pronounce those names correctly, or an insistence that they take up an easier nickname. It is well documented that ethnic minority names on a CV results in a candidate being far less likely to be invited to interview than an identical CV with an Anglo-Saxon sounding name on it. The “Jonathan” sketch by the Goodness Gracious Me BBC TV comedy team nicely captures what happens if the tables turn.
Japanese names in Victorian England
The merit of being called Pernille Rudlin is that there is only one of me, and it is distinctive. That must have been one of the reasons for Tannaker Buhicrosan, the proprietor of the Royal Tycoon Troupe of Japanese sticking with his name both on and off stage. He also had very good reasons for ditching his original, less distinctive name of William Neville. It was the name under which he was convicted of deserting the army, and bigamy.
In 1867 there was none of the baggage of slavery and oppression for Japanese people coming to the UK. In fact, positive attitudes to Japan continued, admiring the victory of Japan in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, resulting in the first victory of East over West in modern history. Although the Germans and French began to fear the “Yellow Peril” and Americans worried about Japanese immigration to the USA, the British did not feel so threatened. Britain graciously called Japan “the Britain of Asia”. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was formed in 1902 and renewed in 1910.
The Japanese ruling elite was very conscious of Japan’s developing status as a world power and were not entirely happy that, apart from themselves, some of the first Japanese to travel overseas were rather low class entertainers.
Some Victorian British variety hall comedy acts advertised themselves as Japanese acrobats, with parody silly names, but mostly the bizarre renderings of Japanese names were used to add an exotic flavour to the advertisements for the Japanese acrobats’ shows rather than to denigrate.
There was no standardized way of transposing Japanese into English when the Japanese acrobats first came to the UK in the 1860s. If Otake, (pronounced O-ta-keh in Japanese) Buhicrosan’s wife, had simply been billed as Otake, as it would be now, it would have been pronounced Otayk. So she was billed as Otakesammer on advertisements for the troupe.
Putting an O in front of girls’ names was a common custom in Edo and Meiji era Japan. Chan is a diminutive suffix for girls, -san is a neutral suffix, both gender-wise and politeness wise and -sama is an honorific.
On the registration of her marriage to Tannaker, Otake appears as Otakesan Ohilosan. It’s not clear where the Ohilosan comes from (presumably a female first name, Ohiro) and she does not use it again. Maybe it was her mother’s first name. She gave her father’s name as Haguro, which is a male first name.
Up until 1875, non-samurai (90% of the Japanese population) were forbidden from having surnames, so Otake and the other Japanese who came to the UK before then would not have had family names, unless they were samurai class or had taken the name of the troupe they were performing with.
Otake had adopted the Christian name Ruth by the time she had her children baptized en masse in 1884. Her name on her death certificate is Taki R Buhicrosan – she, or her family, must have felt that Taki was at least closer to the Japanese pronunciation of Take then Tayk would have been.
When Otake and Tannaker named their first three daughters they gave them Japanese first names – Otakesammer (stage name Otanny and Tani on her death certificate), Ohichan – who tried to make her name into a more grown up Ohi-san, but this ended up as Ohichsan and Ohana – who continued as Ohana until her death in 1960. But of course, each of them lost the distinctive Buhicrosan surname, through their multiple marriages.
Changing names, naming children
Otake and Tannaker named their first son Tannaker, but their other two sons had English first names. All three were given middle names from Tannaker’s family – Tannaker Billingham Buhicrosan, Miles Neville Buhicrosan and Lancelot Reynolds Billingham Buhicrosan.
Tannaker Buhicrosan junior stuck with his name until his death in 1941. Miles had moved to South Africa in the early 1900s with his wife and family and around 1911 he changed his name to Neville Miles. Paul Budden speculates in his book on Tannaker Buhicrosan that this might be because John Miles, a theatrical bill printer and associate of Tannaker’s in the Japanese Village Company, was Miles’ real father. Further evidence for this is cited as the fact that John Miles is named as the father on the marriage certificate of Miles’ second marriage in 1942 in the UK.
I think the explanation is rather less scandalous. The initial change of name in 1911 probably related to the union of South Africa being established in 1910, and with it the race segregation laws that later became the basis for apartheid. It would have been easier for Miles and his family to be clearly white and British in this situation. Although Tannaker Buhicrosan was almost certainly both white and British, John Miles is a far more reassuringly Anglo-Saxon name. Why Miles continued with this ‘white lie’ when he returned to the UK is also easy to understand. In 1942 it would have been very wise to downplay any Japanese connection. It may even have been that John Miles was Miles Neville’s godfather, so he could have justified it as just a slight stretching of the truth.
Lancelot Buhicrosan also switched to calling himself Lancelot Reynolds by 1939. Again, I would imagine for similar reasons to Miles Buhicrosan wanting to be Neville Miles in 1942. The Reynolds name may have come from another of Tannaker’s business associates, John Reynolds Hubbard, who married Tannaker’s second daughter from his marriage to Elizabeth Carter, Catherine Elizabeth Neville, in 1881 in Australia, a couple of years before Lancelot’s birth. By this stage Catherine Elizabeth Neville had adopted her father’s new fake surname, calling herself Laura Neville Buhicrosan.
Things become more confused after the naming of the first three girls. Otakesan Maude Billingham Buhicrosan is born in 1880 – registered with the same Otake root name as her mother and her older sister, but appears in the 1881 register as Maude.
The registration of Winifred’s birth in 1881 was with an English first name, and the Billingham middle name. Ure was only named Ure and there does not seem to be any registration of her birth in 1884. Chiyo’s birth in 1887 was registered – again without a middle name or English first name. Osui is registered as Osnisan in 1890 and in the 1901 census appears as Sue or possibly Sui. She is baptised in 1894 along with Otani’s children Gladys and Laura, ten years after the rest of her siblings. When she marries in 1909, her name is recorded as Osuison Buhicroban.
Ninjin 