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Tetsuko Boxing — Description

Tetsuko is part and creator DavidCMatthews on DeviantArt
Tetsuko Breckenridge was born in Japan, to American parents. Her father, James, had been sent to Japan to head the Asian branch of his company. James and his wife, Patricia, soon fell in love with the people and culture of Japan, and when their daughter was born, they gave her a Japanese first name.
According to the Japanese-English Character Dictionary by Andrew Nelson, there are 13 kanji (the Chinese characters the Japanese adopted for their written language) that can be read "tetsu". The one her parents chose to write "Tetsuko" (Nelson #931, defined as "clear") was used in words that carried a "philosophical" meaning, as in tetsugaku "philosophy" and tetsugakusha "philosopher". But since Tetsuko was somewhat of a tomboy as a child, people tried writing her name with the kanji for "iron"(Nelson #4844), and her parents were sometimes exasperated enough at having to correct this "misspelling" that they toyed with changing her name to something in American English. Ironically, after her "transformation" Tetsuko began adopting the "incorrect" kanjiherself, so that "tetsu-ko" indeed wound up meaning "Iron Girl". ("-ko" [Nelson #1264] as the third syllable in three-syllable female names such as Rumiko and Etsuko is more correctly translated "child", but since this is a female name, the translation of "-ko" as "girl" is not unreasonable.)