https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19976935
ymkjp 2 hours ago | unvote [-]
My wife is a Mongolian Chinese from Xinjiang, and she doesn't have a last name like other Mongolians follow single name convention. That brings lots of mess to our life in Japan.
Firstly I should note that her Chinese passport records her first name as the last name, which I think is a widely adopted way; however, whenever I purchase a boarding pass for her, I need to inquire the company how to fill a required first name field in the form. Most commonly, they let me use a placeholder "MS" in the first name field. Still, even following their instructions, we face minor trouble at ticket counter sometimes. That is fine because the airline offers us compensation such as free first-class seat conversion. So boarding pass is a frequency-wise problem for us.
In severity-wise, the social security system in Japan frightened me. Oh dear. Very soon after I started my career, their representative called me that they would input whitespace (I guess it's in multibyte) as her last name, and told me that they could not guarantee it won't cause any trouble. Imagine you work for 30-40 years and the government's mother-AI sentences that you are not eligible for the national pension as your residential profile doesn't match with the whitespace! Not quite surreal to think about it if the AI learned the less diverse culture in Japan. But I digress. Currently, my wife and I consider registering the legal FBN to use my family name to prevent upcoming troubles.
Software developers, please have a moment to think of the NULL name when your product owner tries to set the first name as required.
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kyawzazaw 1 hour ago | unvote [-]
Burmese here, we don't have family names as well and run into this similar problem in all other countries.
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