Japanese name order confusion

I'm not sure which countries this actually encompasses, but as I'm most familiar with Japan... I noticed that Reika Saiki effectively has two separate galleries: one with her first name first, and one with her last name first (Saiki Reika) as is traditionally seen in Japan. The two make orders are treated as separate people, and this is just one person's entry. It might streamline things to decide on a naming order convention and merge the galleries. Sorry if this has been brought up before.

Thanks for bringing that up. Since we've been using English translations of their names, we're going with the translation provided on her Instagram page. The very first line in her bio reads:

Reika Saiki　才木玲佳

And the Japanese characters, when put into Google translator, return the same result of "Reika Saiki."

And this goes to the community, not just to you, but please continue reporting this. Sometimes a new woman is introduced to the site and her name is very crudely translated or makes no sense at all. And so every upload after that will be the same name until someone brings it to our attention. As moderators, we aren't aware of these things unless they are reported.

Normalising to “western conventions”, for consistency makes sense. We aren’t saying it is better, but since we already have a convention might as well stick to it in the context of this site.

It's very interesting to see this topic came out here because I am a Japanese. You may want to see below article, then from long term perspective Japanese name should be written FAMILY, First but for the time being most of Japanese people are familiar to convert Western style, as we learn in schools. I guess distinguishing two practices is too difficult for non-Kanji user.

oh I cannot paste a direct link, let's search for

"Japan government documents to put family names first"

as an avid anime watcher (lol) it's not foreign to me, but i guess the difference i've seen (and correct me if i'm wrong) is that when i watch anything that has any kind of introduction the whole name is given, and then for the sake of the viewer or the conversation it is shortened + honorific (or maybe not depending), while here you wouldn't normally use your surname when meeting someone casually--for business or formal perhaps yes, but if I'm going to a party and I have no intention of seeing any of these people ever again I just give my first name.

But yes, please correct me if i'm wrong lol, it's just an observation

Part of the reason for what I said is because I have seen in a number of Japanese manga authors have their name presented in both forms. Masamune Shirow and Shirow Masamune come to mind.

I suppose the better approach would be however the athlete most commonly refers to herself in romanisation and if in doubt use western conventions, given context.

@femabs it’s not so much about difficulty, but about context. I’d understand if my name was put last name - first name when presented in Kanji or katakana, while in Japan. If someone kept the Japanese order, in a country that expects the opposite order, it may either cause problems with the paper work or end up having you referred by your family name all the time. I suspect same would be true if I went to Japan and kept the non-Japanese order of names when in Japan?