I have a daughter, and she's two years old. Her name is Keimi, K-e-i-m-i, Keimi.

Now, it's a short name, and it's only five letters, so, uh, it sounds like it's a simple name, but it took us a very long time to come up with that name. And, the reason is, uh, I'm American, and my wife is Japanese, and we wanted a name for our daughter that was, was very, uh -- that worked very well in both languages. And, to come up with that name, well, we had a list of criteria. So we had several points that were important to us, and so the name had to fit every point in this list of criteria.

So, for example, we wanted a name that was a sort of crossover name, that was both Japanese-sounding and English-sounding.

And, the name -- and this was an important point -- the name had to have exactly the same, unambiguous pronunciation in both languages, in both Japanese and English.
 
It had to be easy to say, for both Japanese speakers and English speakers. And, that was difficult, because the languages are different, and they don't share all the same sounds, so there are certain sounds we had to avoid.

Well, the name also had to be pleasant, of course; it had to have a pleasant sound; it had to have a pleasant image.

And, it also needed to be well matched with my last name.

We wanted a name that was kind of unique in some way, but not too eccentric, not too strange.
 
And the name, in terms of Japanese -- it had to have, uh, appealing kanji. It had to have kanji that was, um, appealing both in its form and its imagery. And, the kanji is the Japanese characters, and we spent many, many hours looking through, uh, kanji books, looking at the Japanese characters for, for suitable kanji.

And the last one, uh -- we were hoping that the name could somehow have a connection to the season of her birth, and she was born in late June.

So, we had this long list, and, and we were thinking about this name day after day after day for several months. In fact I was wondering if, if she would probably have to decide on her own name when she got older, because we, we wouldn't have come up with a name by then.
 
But anyway, we, we liked the name "Keimi." We, we thought about the name Keimi, and when we looked through the kanji books, we finally found that the first part of the name, "kei" -- it actually means, uh, "firefly." That's one of the readings for that character, "firefly." We thought that was nice.

And then "mi," uh, means "beauty," and so the name means "beautiful firefly," and we thought that was very nice.

And, uh, also, uh, her birthday is at the end of June, and that actually coincides with firefly season in Japan, so, at that point we knew this was the right name for her, and she became "Keimi."