Naming children

The Japanese government controls names of new babies - meaning you are limited in what you can name your child. While I think this is a restriction of freedom, I think something like this is needed in North America to counter-act the trend of giving your child a weird name along with choosing the most bizarre spelling of it possible. Are these parents trying to torture their kids? Different, sure. *rolls eyes* Obviously they have forgotten that "different" means ridiculed to death by their classmates.

Anyway, this naming thing causes quite a lot of problems for foreigners married to Japanese. When they have children, they often choose a western name for their child, which must be written in phonetic script rather than characters. Apparently there are rules for this too. If the government doesn't agree with your phonetics interpretation, you need to go through a huge bureaucratic nightmare to change it. Basically it would be like wanting to spell "Ann" as "An" and being told that that is not acceptable, so the child's name will be "Ann" until you can prove otherwise.

Who knew that naming a kid could be so complicated? Whatever happened to just naming it after a grandparent or someone who means/meant something important to you?