Fortune magazine's list of the world's top 500 earners for 2008 included 64 Japanese companies. The English names of these global giants are used in both the international and domestic markets. But Japanese versions of each also exist. To cook up these, the enterprises had at hand the sumptuous ingredients of written Japanese — kanji, katakana and Roman letters (romaji) — and a dash of English.
Take the name of imaging and optical giant Canon, which could be mistaken for an English family name but has its roots in a Buddhist deity. In the 1930s, the inventor of Japan's first 35 mm focal-plane shutter camera, a devotee of 観音 (kannon, the goddess of mercy), named it "Kwannon Camera." The company later changed the spelling to "Canon" and uses キヤ in lieu of the "correct" form キャ in the katakana version キヤノン(pronounced kyanon), avoiding empty space in the name.
Other Fortune-ranked companies have names written in both English and katakana. Tokuji Hayakawa invented a mechanical pencil in 1915, dubbing it the Ever-Ready Sharp (known in Japanese as シャーペン, shāpen). Hayakawa's humble workshop has morphed into electronics giant Sharp (シャープ, shāpu). Shojiro Ishibashi, a maker of rubber-soled tabi (split-toe socks) in the '30s, transposed the two kanji comprising his family name, 石 (ishi, stone) and 橋 (hashi, bridge) to create Bridgestone (ブリヂストン, burijisuton), now the world's largest tire manufacturer.