about japanese names.. again

hello,
i would like to ask some tricky questions about names.

1)i have heard that exists a family name "shimaki" 島木, do you think that this can be used as a given name also? of course the kanji are different, but i know that shimako and maki are common female names.. so i think that shimaki doesn't sound particularly strange as a given name. i like this name because as far as i know, it indicates the lintel of a torii gate. well, kasagi 笠木 doesn't sound as nice as the former, isn't it ^_^'?

2) i know that some names given to objects have the suffix "-maru", and it seems that when it is used in people names, this suffix indicates a male gender. since many japanese swords and boats have names in "-maru" should i suppose that these objects are considered of male gender, or "maru" is only a form of affection that can be used for both male and female genders? In Europe, or at least in Italy (i'm Italian) , swords and boats are considered as female. so we give female names to them..

3)if the -maru suffix suggest a "male" object, maybe that the suffix -ko suggest that the object is "female"?

thank you very much!

Why do you think that Shimako is a common female name? I have been in Japan for 10 years and haven't come across it as a given name that I can remember. I do have a student called Shima, but her name stood out to me as being unusual, not common.

As for Shimaki as a name, it sounds a bit odd to me, more like an object than a person. A Japanese person's response is more important here of course, but making up names for a different language and culture from your own is probably not the best idea.

I have also not come across any men with "maru" in their names, only boats- can you give examples of people with "maru" as part of their name? Are you sure it suggests the object is male?

1) "Shimaki" as a given name would be VERY strange. I have not heard of "Shimako" as first name either. Generally speaking, those names with geographical characterstics (such as "mountain," "river" "island" = Shima, "forest" etc.) and place names (such as "bridge") tend to be family names, not given names.

2) This "-maru" by now is only used for boats, I'd say. This being used in names were only in olden times (in old adventure stories and hero cartoons), and for male only.

3) "-ko" written with the kanji meaning "child" is a modern-day common ending for female names. You must be careful, though, because there are male names that apparently end with "-ko" sound but use different characters. And normally you would not use female names ending with "-ko" on OBJECTS.

well, maybe it's not so common (i'n not japanese so i can't be sure about the trend in japan today..), but shimako is used.
shimako sato, shimako murai, shimako iwai, ..

-maru and maro maybe are not common today, but they were widely used in the past for males (as far as i know), like -ko for females.

thanks for your help.

i forgot to say that names in -maru were common, but as Yômyô .. maybe for this reason is not so easy to find examples of them. a classic example of this is Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 (1159-89) that was called Ushiwakamaru.

The Japanese language does not have grammatical gender (unlike Italian),
so there's no such concept that every object is categorized into either
male or female.

Even if an object has a name whose suffix is common to a personal given
name (e.g. -maru), it does not necessarily mean that the object is
clearly considered either male or female.