I have rather fancy and sophisticated real name first name. However back in the days most people used rather ugly diminutive versions of it, depriving my name of its birthright glory.
However, there was one person in my life, who revived its glory and made many people around me to acknowledge it. That was my friend Tsukasa.
Back when we both studied English together, there was a policy of replacing hard to pronounce foreign names with reasonably similar English names. Most of the time it only affected Chinese people. However, Chinese do adopt English names themselves as part of their own approach to life.
It is a general tradition of Chinese to adopt new names at reaching various milestones in life, like for example graduation from university. All the students will take a new name after graduating. Perhaps as a statement of one's achievement. In same lieu, adopting an English name on immigrating into English speaking country is also a thing Chinese and Taiwanese people just normally do.
That however does not apply to Japanese. Japanese keep their names for life just like most other cultures do. Thus, it baffled Tsukasa when he was also told to go by the name 'Nick' instead of his birth name. He always told the teachers to call him Tsukasa and not Nick and most but not all obliged. That was all the stranger considering Tsukasa is not hard to pronounce at all, however some of our teachers insisted that he has to go by Nick.
Tsukasa hated it and push for as many people as he could to call him Tsukasa. Just as he was zealous about his own name, he was zealous of mine. He too always called me by my full first name and push for as many people as possible to do the same. Overtime my full name in its full glory became the name all of my friends and associated used on a daily basis. He even rendered it in hiragana and katakana for me.
Thus, thanks to Tsukasa, I developed received admiration for my full first name.
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