Sessou as a company name?
 

I am starting up an IT consultancy based in England and will be doing business mainly in the UK but also the rest of Europe.

It's very difficult to pick a suitable name for a company and I needed to pick one that was available to register with Companies House and also with the .com domain name available.

I did some research and consulted with a few people and settled on "Sessou Ltd." as the word Sessou apparently meant "integrity" in Japanese.

However...2 sources have now replied very late to tell me that the word Sessou is normally used in a negative way and often to mean "infidelity". I had different information online and also through a couple of people that got back to me in time.

I'm now concerned that I have a company called Sessou Ltd. (Limited) and the name will cause me problems.

To clarify, I am not expecting to do business with Japan any time soon (although this may happen in future) and I am not selling any Japanese software or focussing on the Japanese market in any way, it's just a name.

I used the following sources (among others):
EUdict | sessou | Japanese-English dictionary
sessou Free Dictionary Translation Online English Translator
Japanese Symbol for Integrity
The word Honor And Integrity in Chinese Characters and Japanese Kanji Symbols / Letters / Words / Glyphs

Can some people advise? I will need to change the company name asap if it needs to be done and this will cause some problems.

Thanks,
Mark.

"Sessou" to me, who is a Japanese-speaker, would be the funniest company name one could think of unless you sold chastity belts or something. Even if you did, it would still be a funny and weird name. Wonder who those people are that recommended it.

But then if you are not dealing with Japanese-speakers as you stated, why do would you care? You said it's just a name.

Thanks for the response. The people that said it was ok are supposedly fluent Japanese speakers but not actually Japanese. Also, many websites back up the fact that the name means "integrity".

I will not be targetting Japanese speakers but I cannot be in a situation where I want to do business with a company and the decision maker is Japanese. It would be embarrassing to be in that situation.

It is just a name but the translation from "integrity" is the reason that I chose it so either I just keep the name and forget mentioning the meaning or I have to change it. However if you Google "Sessou", the first entry is EUdict | sessou | Japanese-English dictionary so it's obvious where I got the name from...

"SESSOU” itself is not a bad word. However, it is usually used in negative form and this is the reason why Japanese people feel it as a bad word.

Thanks for your feedback too. So if you were to deal with a company called Sessou Ltd. then you would think it's a strange thing for a company to be called?

I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that I will have to scrap this company and start another one...

It is just too heavy a word that has to do with one's moral values including those regarding sex and, as RadioKid stated, the word is much more frequently used to describe a person's lack of those values than the abundance of them. Accordingly, the vast majority of Japanese-speakers would tend to associate the word with someone's lack of "sessou" despite the original positive meaning of the word.

A "lack of 'sessou'" can mean:
abandonment of principles
unscrupulousness
whore-like
illegit

Need I go on? Like I said, these are the opposite of what "sessou" originally means but they would unfortunately be what we picture in our heads upon hearing the word.

Thanks. So it's back to the drawing board...

On the off-chance. If anyone has any suggestions of a short name that means something positive (like integrity, honour etc.) and also is good in English (both in writing and aurally), I'd appreciate it so I can add it to my new shortlist!

Out of interest, why name it something Japanese if your company has no links to japan and isn't selling product or service that isn't anything to do with Japan either?

I would find it rather -weird- to encounter a British run, British based company with a random Japanese word for a name; that and it throws up the 'well what does that mean?' question, when you just want people to take it at face value. Also for non-Japanese speakers, Japanese words are often hard to pronounce and hard to remember. Sorry, but to me it's like the business equivalent of having a kanji tattoo when you can't read it; just kind of silly.

It's incredibly difficult to come up with a company name that sounds good (I was pronouncing it Se-soo because that seemed to be the easiest even though I know it's incorrect) and I know people have named their company after a tiny village they visited once in a distant country or a beautiful foreign name that they once heard.

If it's not easy to come up with a name that obviously means something (i.e. Easyjet), then it's good to come up with a name that is simple to pronounce, not too long and at least has some meaning. I hoped to have this name and to be engaged with the question "What does it mean?" and be able to tell them that it means "integrity" in Japanese. It says something important about the company and our ethos in doing business.

And yet you've got one out of three so far.

Dictionary errors aside, Japanese is clearly not easy to pronounce because you're opting to pronounce it entirely wrong to make it simple, which to Japanese listeners, actually probably makes it not even a word (I mean, why not invent a word and tell people it means whatever you want in whatever dialect strikes your fancy, if you're not going to even stick to the reality of language rules), and to top it all you forgot to check for colloquial differences in meaning.

I honestly appreciate that you want something unique that would provide a fancy lead-in, but I really think you're going to end up giving yourself a long-term headache by trying to do it in a language you don't have much of a grasp of. Why not pick something more meaningful to you personally? Or why not pick an established fictional/mythical figure who stands for the kinds of ethos you want to portray?