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sleepy_keita parent
No, it was just the name of the person who started the company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda Lots of Japanese companies are like this. See also Toyota.

> See also Toyota.

Toyota's founder is Kiichiro Toyoda (with a 'd'), and the company was originally named Toyoda, named after the founder. It was later changed to Toyota because it looked better in Katakana script (8 brush strokes, which is a lucky number), and it had a better meaning in Japanese. Apparently Toyoda is a farmer's name, and the company did not want to be associated with farming.

Similarly, Mazda comes from it's founder's name Matsuda, but was changed to Mazda when the first wheeled vehicles were produced (Mazda-Go). The official claim from Mazda is that it was named after Ahura Mazda, a God, but it is widely speculated that the name change was done to make it more appealing for international markets. I don't speak Japanese, but I have seen several videos on social media where the Japanese still pronounce Mazda as Matsuda.

numpad0
English and Japanese pronunciations never line up well which complicates communications, so people tweak spelling all the time. Toyota or Mazda or muRata is all about that. Matsuda was always matsuda in Japanese but spelling it as Mazda skips whole ordeal about matt-sudah or mar-TSOO-dah. Mazda is just short and close enough. Isuzu unfortunately has the yee-zoo-zoo problem, it's more like "iszh" but it won't roll on any tongue and there isn't much that they can do about it now.

"main farm", "rich farm", "pine farm", "bell tree", "sun field", "river cape", "fifty bells", it's all just surnames. Nothing particularly more awe inspiring than any regular surnames would be.

MangoToupe
That name didn't pop out of nowhere. It still has meaning beyond the brand. I'm wholly unconvinced that the only possible meaning is referring to that one company.
nottorp
I'll raise you Procter & Gamble.

Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it? I'm thinking that's how the Honda name looks to a Japanese.

The one major Japanese company whose name does have a deep meaning - that I know of - is Mazda, which is explicitly derived from Ahura Mazda.

MangoToupe
> Doesn't look like it has a deep meaning does it?

Like, to a non-english speaker? Because it looks loaded with meaning to me. Would you think that all instances of the word "morgan" refer to the bank "jp morgan"? Do you think that people who gamble are referring to the company you brought up? Why would you just give a top level domain name to a single company? No company is that interesting by itself. Hence, my question.

But maybe I'm just weird when it comes to language.

Anyway, I'll wait for a japanese person to fill me in ig—I can google where a name comes from, but this doesn't answer how it's actually perceived by someone who speaks the language.

nottorp
I’m not a native speaker. But I’ve read and communicated enough in English to see Procter & Gamble as just two names.
thfuran
Neither are anything like common as names (at least in the US. Maybe there's loads of them running around London), and both are words in common use. Johnson & Johnson seems like a much better example for that.
glandium
Mazda also comes from the founder's name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujiro_Matsuda

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