59827
In premodern Japanese, it was traditional for a prestigious or extremely
honorable man whose name was read with kun'yomi to have the reading of his
personal name changed to on'yomi in certain situations, a process called
有職読み【ゆうそくよみ】. (Women virtually never had 有職読み, presumably because Heian period
women were not supposed to read kanbun.) Some notable examples of this
include:

  * 源 頼光 Minamoto no Yorimitsu (944-1021), who became Minamoto no Raikô
  * 徳川 慶喜 Tokugawa Yoshinobu (1837 - 1913), who became [Tokugawa Keiki](http://no-sword.jp/blog/2010/11/keiki-san.html)
  * 伊藤 博文 Itô Hirobumi (1841 - 1909), who became Itô Hakubun
  * 原 敬 Hara Takashi (1856 - 1921), who became [Hara Kei](http://www.mfca.jp/harakei/)

I have read that 有職読み applies especially after the individual's death.
However,
[Wikipedia](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%89%E8%81%B7%E8%AA%AD%E3%81%BF)
doesn't bear this out and it also has some odd counterexamples:

  * 野沢 那智 Nozawa Nachi (1938 – 2010) was asked whether his personal name's real reading was Yasutomo and said that he wasn't sure.
  * 横溝 正史 Yokomoto Seishi (1902 – 1981) had a kun'yomi on his birth certificate but it was never used.

So, two questions I'd like to have verified: is there a general rule by which
the use of on'yomi is applied, and has it ever applied to people born after
1945? Is it entirely arbitrary, or was there a rule that was abandoned at some
point?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-06-30T20:01:07.463
59814
2018-07-01T18:30:21.733
583
question
readings names multiple-readings
What was the process by which 有職読み applied to personal names?
As the comments helpfully indicated, what I've written above is actually [an
academic myth, based on misreading of a book published in
1980](http://www.kanken.or.jp/project/data/investigation_incentive_award_2016_miura.pdf).

> 「読み癖」と同義だったはずの「有職読み」は、角田文衛『日本の女性名』が誤読され、そこにウィキペディアが介在したことにより、
> 「名の字音読み」の意で用いられ始めた。定着から僅か十年程度の幽霊語である。名乗訓みの方が「有職読み」の条件を満たしていること、近代の人名音読は「ゐなかよみ」の性質を多分に有していることなどから、この語を用いるべきではないと考える。
>
> 有職読み [meaning something like "formal reading"], which should rather be
> synonymous with "common parlance" [i.e. a common reading of a name or word],
> has started to be used in a way meaning "on'yomi personal name" as a result
> of a misunderstanding of the book _Japanese Women's Names_ by Bun'ei Tsunoda
> which was imported into Wikipedia. This is a [ghost
> word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word) which has begun to appear in
> the past 10 years [i.e. as Wikipedia has become more widely cited]. Now,
> kun'yomi name reading is rather the more "formal reading" [because it
> follows rigid rules], while the pronunciation of personal names in the
> 1868-1945 period was often a "rustic reading" [i.e. based on sight and
> acquaintance, and freely variant], so we are of the opinion that the term
> 有職読み should not be used.

And to add another note, 有職読み probably became a "ghost word" because the way
it is constructed sounds like it is a formal, theoretical term, whereas in
fact it was simply a product of Tsunoda's writing style.

To answer my own question, there have never been formal rules determining
whether to read a name through kun'yomi or on'yomi; the two used to be freely
mixed, while kun'yomi became standard after 1945, until the invention of
kirakira names which destroyed society forever.
CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-07-01T18:30:21.733
59827
2018-07-01T18:30:21.733
2020-06-17T08:18:27.500
-1
583
59814
answer