It's interesting that the ethnic minority characters very broadly represented the regions they came from, while the Caucasian characters from the western hemisphere were given more specific origins. Instead of a "pan-European" character, we got Scotty and Chekov, who were stereotypically (sometimes comically so) Scottish and Russian, respectively. And McCoy had a regional accent and "southern gentleman" persona.
Does this mean that the western world stayed stagnant and maintained regional diversity for hundreds of years, while Asia and Africa moved toward greater homogeneity (while their personal naming conventions changed so much that people have names that can't possibly exist in the present day)?
No, it means that American audiences at the time saw other cultures like Asians and Africans as uniform "others," and Roddenberry was trying to address the perceptions of white American audiences and give them positive portrayals of those groups as a whole. But unfortunately, it ended up being rather racially problematical in itself, because of that selfsame homogenization, the choice to portray them as generic rather than authentic representatives of specific cultures. The same thing was done with Chakotay on
Voyager -- instead of identifying him with a specific Native American people, they made him a "generic" Indian from an invented amalgam culture. I gather that real Native American viewers are not very happy with that.
Honestly, I wish McIntyre had chosen a different name. Hikaru was the nickname of the title character in the world's oldest novel, The Tale of Genji by the Lady Murasaki, and The Entropy Effect made it clear that Sulu was named in reference to the book's character. But Genji is a really, really awful human being. He's a rich, shallow, vapid, entitled noble with no worthwhile qualities beyond beauty and breeding, and he's a rapist and abuser of women in a culture where such behavior was normative. I read the book in college (well, an abridged, translated version), and I don't think I have ever loathed a fictional protagonist more intensely (not even Holden Caulfield). Sulu deserved a better namesake.
It sounds like McIntyre didn't read the book.
More likely she was just more willing to see the positives in it than I was. It was a product of the cultural assumptions of its time, after all, like any work is. I couldn't get past the sexism and entitlement and shallowness of Genji, but he was intended as a paragon of the traits that were admired in the Japanese nobility of the time, so maybe McIntyre was better able to look past the cognitive dissonance with our own values and appreciate it in the spirit in which it was written. I loathed the character myself, but I'm not going to assume another person lacks familiarity with the text just because she reacted to it differently than I did.
Sulu was supposed to be a pan-Asian character
Too bad his first name wasn't also pan-Asian.
Except that "Sulu" is
not a "pan-Asian" name in any sense. It's a Filipino name. It's from the language of the Tausug people of the Philippines and is a variant of the Malay name of their home region. The only reason Roddenberry thought of it as "pan-Asian" was because he saw it as the name of a sea that abutted a few Asian countries (a
very few in just one small region of Asia), but that was a really, really nonsensical and ignorant way of coming to that conclusion. It just underlines that Roddenberry knew very little about the cultures he was trying to represent positively. Good intentions but awful research skills.
Except it's not really a legitimate Swahili name. It should be Uhuru, but Roddenberry stuck a totally incongruous Romance-language feminine suffix on it. And as far as I know, Swahili-speaking peoples generally use two names -- e.g. Uhuru Kenyatta, the current (male) president of Kenya. Calling her "Uhura," no other name, isn't really African, it's pseudo-Africana filtered through a white person's perceptions. "Uhura" as a surname makes no linguistic sense, but at least giving her a first and last name is more authentic.
Language changes over time. Perhaps by that century naming practices will have changed as well.
Granted, many or most African cultures did not traditionally use surnames in the European sense. For instance, in some West African cultures, a person's second name is the name of their father rather than a family name. And while it was common to have more than one name, it apparently was not universal, and might not be even today. (By the way, in looking up information on African naming patterns, I found a PDF college thesis about it in the context of African-American names, and one of the examples given was the name of a person I think I went to college with, or perhaps a similarly-named relative of his. Small world.) If anything, many African cultures tend to give their children multiple names, and the choice of names can have a complex meaning and set of traditions behind it.
But if you're going to portray a cultural change, it should be based on research into the culture in question and plausibly extrapolated from its history and values. It shouldn't be making something up out of ignorance and then just arbitrarily asserting that the culture changed itself to fit your wild guesses. That's no better than stereotyping. It's portraying them as an exotic Other and assuming that it doesn't matter
how they differ from familiar Eurocentric norms, so long as they fall into "Them" rather than "Us."
I mean, why should it be Africans who've arbitrarily changed their naming customs? Why not have a white character use only one name, or who has multiple names according to African or Arab convention? Or, heck, if you want a character who uses only one name,
do the damn research and pick someone from a part of the world where people actually do use only one name, like Indonesia.
Roddenberry was trying to be inclusive, but he was coming at it from a deeply Eurocentric and uneducated perspective, and he settled for doing a minimum of research and making up crap that would sound plausible to ignorant white audiences who wouldn't know the difference, rather than doing the actual legwork to get it right. That is not something to be embraced.
