The first was "when does a decade start and end?". I had been a firm believer that a decade starts on the one year and therefore ends at the 10 spot. My logic was that when I start counting things, I start on one. When I count off music, I start on 1. So years should start on one, i.e. 2001, and end on 10, 2010, and 2011 is that start of a new decade.
But then I looked at my rock music collection which I have categorized by decade for simplicity, and, for example, "80s rock" covers releases from 1980 to 1989, not 1981 to 1990. That was logical and compelling enough for me. So now I have accepted that the aught decade indeed ended at 2009, not 2010, and we are already one year through the 10s.
The other issue was that I take offense at how Chinese language insists on pronouncing Japanese names how they're written Chinese. You can't talk about famous Japanese people like Namie Amuro or Hayao Miyazaki with a Mandarin speaking person unless you first establish you are talking about the same person. Mandarin speakers pronounce the names one way, and everyone else pronounces them respecting the Japanese pronunciation.
But when Namie Amuro comes to Taiwan to give a concert, all the fans are shouting "Namie", not whatever the name is in Chinese, or else how would she know they are calling her name? Wise these fans.
I also argued that if I were famous, I would take offense if my name were rendered differently, unrecognizably in some other language. But then I realized, what if my given name was "Henry"? Would I take offense if the French pronounced it "Henri" their way, or the Spanish referred to me as "Enrique"? Probably not. And that's exactly what the Chinese are doing.
It doesn't matter that with many Western European names, the equivalents are close enough to guess at the name, while the Mandarin pronunciation of characters is so totally different from Japanese pronunciations that it registers as gibberish. The principle is that they're reading it the way that simply makes sense to them. To render Japanese names to be phonetically more accurate would probably be worse.
It doesn't solve the problem. Unless you can establish who you're talking about, such as by describing him as the most famous Japanese anime film director, you can't talk to a Mandarin speaker about Hayao Miyazaki if you don't know they pronounce his name something like "gong qi jun" with the proper tones. (Of course if a Westerner wants to talk about him to a Japanese person, the Japanese person will have to make the realization that we flip the first and last names, but it's easy for them to realize we mean Miyazaki Hayao).
So I can't take offense at that anymore. Mandarin speaking people are totally justified in pronouncing Japanese names in Mandarin, and I just have to suck up any feeling of misappropriation of identity and admit I'm in Rome, so do as the Romans do.
And, of course, the West isn't blameless, either. If you go to a Chinese person and want to talk about Confucius, they'll be like, "Who the hell is 'Confucius'?". Same with other historical figures like Mencius and Koxinga. When I was studying Chinese history (required for my major), I didn't like using those names because even I could tell those weren't proper Chinese names, but likely colonialist, imperialist bastardizations.
