time saying, in effect, "Why shouldn't the common people name their daughters X-ko? I think it's lovely." In other words, mass media may well have played the decisive role in promulgating -ko names among the people of Japan, by including them both explicitly and implicitly in the the post-Meiji national identity that the media shaped.

Ali:

That's interesting. I'd noticed there was an excess of -ko names in Western film & tv, but I'd thought it just a terrible cliche that was part of the cookie-cutter Japanese characters, and not something more. Certainly plausible that the wider reach of media played a substantial part in the influence, when you consider in the West, the popularity of actors or their roles often spawned (and still do) trends in baby names.

"names endingin -ko are out of fashion": You astonish me! Having grown up in Japan in the '50s and early '60s, I think of them as completely standard, and in fact am always a little surprised when I see a woman's name that doesn't end in -ko.

Matt:

I've been helping to transcribe a lot of Japanese-only late Meiji to early Showa gravestones in a Japanese cemetery in Honolulu that was founded in 1908. It's interesting that most of the women's given names (wives and daughters) are written in katakana only. (Lot less headache to transcribe than all the men's name-kanji, esp. for given names!) Some women's names end in -ko during the 1910s, but lots more end in -e (like Harue) and -yo (Chiyo, Masayo). One young eldest son who