"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet."
--from Romeo and Juliet (Act II, scene ii)

In Japan, Western names are first pronounced phonetically using the Japanese sounds and then written in katakana. So traditionally Shakespeare's Juliet has been pronounced Jurietto (with a pause where the "tt" is) and written like this:

Never being one to follow tradition, I decided to see what my name might look like in kanji characters. This is not such a simple task. There are thousnads of characters and each one can have several pronuciations. There is also the meaning to consider, because each character represents a word and thus a name presents a collection of those words. So with the help of my Japanese instructor, Tusbata-sensei, I have come up with the following kanji representation.

Thus, the meaning of my name is the acendance to joy through the acceptance of truth. A sentiment that I think very well expresses my life up to now and where I want to go in the future. I am very happy with it!

My surname presented an even more difficult challenge. Carnell should be pronounced Ka-nerru in Japanese (with a double length "a" to simulate an "r" sound and a pause at the "rr") and written like this in katakana:

The problem arrises because the long "ka-" sound is not naturally occuring in Japanese and there is no kanji that represents it.

Another way to represent Western names is to translate the meaning of the name and select kanji based on that. Carnell is an English word derived from Gaelic which means "Defender of the Castle". In Japanese that would be "Shiro no mori" or shortened to Shiromori. Shiromori is a comon surname in Japan and uses the following kanji:

So, even though it does not represent the pronunciation of my Western sounding name, it does have the same meaning.