With American voters having virtually only two candidates to choose from in the November presidential election, a man went out of his way to offer the electorate an alternative.
Army veteran and seventh-grade math teacher Texan Dustin Ebey has offered himself as an option to Democratic standard bearer and incumbent President Joe Biden and Republican bet former president Donald Trump if he can get enough signatures on his petition to put his new name on the ballot.
Ebey legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else.
Else is urging voters to write his new name in the “neither” field of the ballot if he fails to get the required 110,000 signatures on his petition.
While Ebey or Else gives American voters a choice other than Biden and Trump, the Japanese may have fewer name choices due to a law that requires married couples to share the same surname.
Hiroshi Yoshida, an economist at Tohoku University in Sendai, had been commissioned by the “Think Name Project” to do a study in support of the group’s advocacy to preserve the diversity of Japanese surnames and to clamor for legal changes that would allow couples to each keep their last names.
The professor unveiled the findings of his study on 1 April. Yoshida projected that if the law was passed, all Japanese people would have the surname Sato by 2531.
Sato is the most common surname in Japan, according to Myoji Yurai, a company that tracks the more than 300,000 surnames in the country, CNN reports. Some 1.8 million Japanese out of the 125 million population have that surname.
Yoshida, however, said that his calculation would only hold if the number of Japanese marriages increased. The opposite is actually happening.
If the trend of declining marriages, fertility, and births continues, the Think Name Project won’t have to worry about the entire population being surnamed Sato by 2531, as it would face a more pressing concern.
“The possibility of the Japanese race going extinct is high,” Yoshida said in his report, according to CNN.
