[TBox]

I've been thinking about this for a while now and have my own question about this kind of thing. There's an anthropological issue here. Using "boy" as an appellation in English doesn't quite mean the same thing as in Japan. A few examples:

1. Anime named Code Geass, the main character calls another character オレンジさん. At the time there's no apparent reason for it. For some reason this really tickled the fans, and despite knowing his real name, in Japan they keep calling him オレンジさん. When it came over to the English world, however, オレンジさん quickly became Orange boy.

2. A Chinese character in a Japanese video game is named 紅 美鈴. Everyone in Japan calls her 中国 because they can't decide if she's ほん めいりん or くれない みすず. Before the maker of the game set the record straight, in English we called her China Girl. After the maker settled on ほん めいりん, we all call her Hong Meiling, but Japan still calls her 中国 pretty frequently.

4. I'm sure you're familiar with 電車男. He uses that to identify himself on anonymous message boards because that's his prominent characteristic. When English speakers do the same thing, they use "guy," not "boy." For example, there's a picture floating around of a guy telling stories about how his dad liked to mess with his head. The first one's about his dad filling his room with frog beanie babies. In later stories he introduces himself as "frog guy," which would be the parallel to 電車男.

Also, 電車男's girlfriend is called エルメス. Again, in English, we would've called her Hermes girl, since it derives from her gift of some Hermes brand tea cups.

I could go on with other examples of native Japanese choosing to rename a person completely, where in English we'd add boy or guy or girl, so given all that, I'm wondering if 桜少年 is still the right translation for the effect tombstonehand is trying to achieve. If it is, can you comment on the renaming tendency?