Tag Archives: Linguistics

What is the Story Behind ChibiUsa / Small Lady’s Name?

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An Unreadable Poker Face

An Unreadable Poker Face

What’s in a name? That’s a question we’ve asked many times already, but it’s always worth taking another look at the characters we love just a little bit closer and see if there’s something more to find out about them in something as simple as what we call them. If you want to talk about name mysteries, ChibiUsa definitely has a lot to offer to the conversations — she has a pretty long name after all! Her official name is Usagi Small Lady Serenity,1 though she’s typically referred to as ChibiUsa (Sailor Pluto, however, typically prefers Small Lady in the Black Moon Family arc) in order to avoid confusion with Usagi. So where does the Small Lady name come from?

Though Naoko has never officially remarked on this in detail, we can make some interesting inferences from what we know about language use in manga.

She's not 'chibi,' and don't forget it!

She’s not ‘chibi,’ and don’t forget it!

What’s interesting about the Small Lady name is that it’s already written either in roman characters as “S L” or written out in the Japanese phonetic alphabet, katakana, which is used for foreign words and sound effects.2 Though at first glance, this may imply that there’s no deeper meaning to be had, but that leads us into an interesting use of language in manga: very often, authors will intentionally apply kanji to Western words (to give them context) or will read a kanji with a Western word. One of the more famous examples is the first appearance of Super Saiyans in the Dragon Ball manga. What we all know of as Super Saiyan can be written in Japanese as either スーパーサイヤ人 (su-pa-saiyajin) or as 超サイヤ人 (su-pa-saiyajin),3 though it’s interesting to note that 超 should be read as chou and cannot be read as “super.”4

So why all this talk about Dragon Ball? Well, it was an anime and manga contemporary to Sailor Moon so we know that the phenomenon was already common at the time and gives credence to the idea that there might be some deeper meaning to the Small Lady name. Fortunately for us, the options are pretty limited, but the most likely choice for a kanji reading for Small Lady is: 少女 (shoujo; lit. small lady / maiden)5 If that sounds familiar to you, well, it should: these are the very same characters used in the title of the series: 美少女戦士セーラームーン (bishoujo senshi se-ra-mu-n; Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon). An alternative literal kanji choice would also be 乙女 (otome; lit. small lady / maiden). You would probably recognize this word as the ending theme to the Sailor Moon R anime: 乙女のポリシー (otome no porishi-; Maiden’s Policy).6 More likely than not, the Small Lady name is in reference to the very term her mother, Usagi, used to refer to herself as a sailor-suited soldier of justice.

Usagi Small Lady Serenity

Usagi Small Lady Serenity

The story with ChibiUsa’s name is interesting in general due to the Serenity name connecting her to her mother and even down the line to her grandmother. Even more interesting is that she doesn’t seem to be given a last name (neither Tsukino nor Chiba), which implies that the people of Crystal Tokyo don’t use last names. It may be a small detail, but I’m glad to see that Usagi maintained her independence, even through marriage!

Why Isn’t Minako’s Name Associated With Venus?

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Sailor Venus and Her Forlorn Namesake Planet

Sailor Venus and Her Forlorn Namesake Planet

One of the first things anyone with even a passing interest in learning Japanese will notice is that the names of all of the (inner) Sailor Soldiers is that their names follow a pretty noticeable pattern. Even if you haven’t studied Japanese, you’ve likely read about their names and explanations thereof in countless numbers of profiles online. For the sake of a quick summary, the Japanese no (の) serves as a possessive and can mean something similar to “of” or signify ownership, much like ” ‘s ” in English. In this way, the last name of each of the characters makes a nice wordplay which signifies not only elemental affinity, but the celestial object they’re tied to. Though the English names for the planets are gaining traction in recent years, traditionally the other inner planets (excluding Earth) and Jupiter have been referred to by elements, which ties back into the elemental affinities of the inner soldiers.

Mercury to Jupiter, in Japanese

Mercury to Jupiter, in Japanese

Here you can see the Japanese names of the planets: Mercury (水星; suisei – water planet), Venus (金星; kinsei – metal planet), Earth (地球; chikyuu – earth globe), the Moon (月; tsuki – Moon), Mars (火星; kasei – fire planet), and Jupiter (木星; mokusei – wood planet).

The same characters are found in the name of the Sailor Soldiers: 月野うさぎ (Tsukino, Usagi – Usagi/Rabbit of the Moon), 地場衛 (Chiba, Mamoru – Mamoru/Protector of the Earth), 水野亜美 (Mizuno, Ami – Ami of the Water), 火野レイ (Hino, Rei – Rei of the Fire), 木野まこと (Kino, Makoto – Makoto of Wood), and 愛野美奈子 (Aino, Minako – Minako of… Love). As you can see, Minako breaks out of this system in a pretty dramatic way and leaves us with the question of just why is it that Ms. Takeuchi decided to not follow the pattern with her in the first place.

The Sailor of Love and Beauty

The Sailor of Love and Beauty

The easiest answer, of course, is simply that Minako came first, as we talked about before in her debut in Sailor V, approximately half a year prior to her appearance in the Sailor Moon manga. Minako is the self-proclaimed Sailor Soldier of love and beauty, so it only makes sense that she has a name that matches, right? Obviously her character being created prior to the rest and before Ms. Takeuchi herself had the naming patter down clearly plays a roll in this, but there are several other reasons which likely played into the decision.

For one, in order to name Minako after the planet Venus (and to conform with the naming system of the rest of the Sailor Soldiers), she would have had to name her 金野美奈子 (Kin’no, Minako). This name unfortunately doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue in Japanese, and obviously is a little too close to comfort with Makoto’s name. The other reason is that, through a clever play on kanji readings, it turns out that Ms. Takeuchi already did manage to sneak Venus into her name, all without having to bother with using her last name to do it.

As you may know (and probably noticed above), Japanese kanji can generally be read at least two different ways, very often more. These readings are referred to as their on and kun readings.1 Taking Ami’s name, for example, her last name Mizuno (水野) contains the same character as Suisei (水星). The same applies to Hino (火野) and Kasei (火星), and Kino (木野) and Mokusei (木星). Well, if one were to take alternative readings for Minako‘s (美奈子) first name, you can actually pronounce her name as Binasu2 – the older Japanese romanization of the English name “Venus.”

So while it might not be apparent on the surface, it turns out that Ms. Takeuchi did manage to slip the the planetary reference into Minako’s name! It’s amazing how far she really thought these things through…

What Other Series Inspired Sailor Moon’s Title?

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The Various Forms of Senshi

The Various Forms of Senshi

As we discussed earlier, the term senshi as used in Sailor Moon‘s title is the cause of quite a bit confusion due to the change from the traditional Soldier and being re-interpreted as Guardian in recent years. While doing all the research into the background on the name, though, I ran across multiple examples of the use of senshi pre-dating Sailor Moon (which isn’t too surprising) in a form rather similar to that in Sailor Moon, which gives us more of a sense of the context in which the title existed and how the title Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon fit into Japanese public consciousness in the early 1990s.

It turns out that during the early- to mid-1970s, there was a great deal of manga, anime, and live action series bearing the senshi moniker. For those who lived through the late 80s and through the 90s in the US, you may be familiar with the popularity of the term “ninja” almost anywhere you looked, in comics, cartoons, tv shows, and movies. As the Vietnam war ramped up and drew attention around the globe, soldiers and the military came into the limelight and even pacifist nations like Japan were pulled into the build-up. Unfortunately, the traditional term for a military soldier, heishi (兵士) was, and is today, heavily stigmitized in the post-war era. Even today, the term used when applied to the Japanese military nearly exclusively refers to the combatants in WWII and prior to that.

The term of senshi, however, carried with it no such stigma and was more closer tied to the older samurai warriors. So what can we learn about the context of senshi leading up to Sailor Moon? Well, as it turns out, there’s a richer story than you’d initially believe!

Continue reading →

How did the Ministry of Education Change Sailor Moon?

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Ministry of Education Orders Sailor Venus to Change Name

Ministry of Education Orders Sailor Venus to Change Name

Though on the surface that may seem completely unrelated, you’d be surprised to know that – at least in some minor way – the Japanese Ministry of Education (now the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology)1 had an effect on the characters of the Sailor Moon universe, at least in Japanese.

First, a little bit of background…

Japanese is pronounced in vowel and vowel-consonant2 pairs. The five vowel sounds: a, i, u, e, and o. The consonants are: k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r, and w (though there are voiced and unvoiced pairs for k/g, s/z, and t/d and a a voiced and unvoiced bilabial pair for h/b/p).3 Whenever a foreign word has been brought over into Japanese, it traditionally needed to fit into this pronunciation system in order to become a proper gairaigo (borrowed word)4 though there have been some concessions since the early 20th century to adapting the Japanese language to accommodate new sounds.5

Sailor Venus' first appearance in Sailor Moon (October 1992 ed. of Nakayoshi; p. 80)

Sailor Venus’ first appearance in Sailor Moon (October 1992 ed. of Nakayoshi; p. 80)

So, what changed?

As you’ve probably already figured out from our list of available sounds, we’ve got a slight problem with not having a “v” sound in Japanese. After WWII when the writing system was being re-standardized in 1954 for the fledgling remodeled education system, it was determined by Japanese Language Council that the “v” sound should be written consistently with the similar-sounding “b.”6 As the world became more international and Japanese exposure to foreign words increased, it became apparent that this approximation was insufficient, and the Council decided in 1991 to re-adopt an older approximation used, which was pronounced similar to the English “v” but written as a voiced “u” (ウ/u – ヴ/v).

And that’s where our question comes in: as you see above, when Minako first introduces herself in the Sailor Moon manga as “Sailor Venus” (and not “Sailor V” or “the Princess”), Ms. Takeuchi used the newer writing style of セーラーヴィーナス (Sērā Vīnasu). As you may recall, though, Sailor V pre-dates Sailor Moon by a little less than a year. So how did she give her name back in 1991?

Sailor Venus' First Appearance (August 1991 ed. of RunRun; p. 59)

Sailor Venus’ First Appearance in Sailor V (August 1991 ed. of RunRun; p. 59)

As suspected, in her introduction (left side, middle of the page) she gives her name as セーラービーナス (Sērā Bīnasu), the way of writing it prior to when the order was passed by the Ministry of Education on June 28, 1991.7 Since the official order was given out in late June and the manga published in August, it’s very likely that Ms. Takeuchi had already finished and sent it out for proofing and editing. Still, it’s interesting to see that even stuffy, boring acts of the government can have even a minor impact on the anime and manga we all love!