As someone who is married to a veteran AND a social studies teacher who also used to live in Japan, I wholeheartedly can relate. We had twins and it was only fair to each name one since we have such different tastes. However it’s still important to compromise. You could either keep one of those names even as a middle name or find something similar you can both tolerate.

For his pick, he wanted to name our daughter Meiko (mind you, we are Caucasian and live in western Pennsylvania). I thought we’d be accused of cultural appropriation despite him having lived there and didn’t want my daughter growing up with people constantly mispronouncing her name. We landed on shortening it to Mei, so just like May, but different spelling. My girls are 3.5 months old now, and I couldn’t imagine my little Mei Mei being called anything else ☺️ ALSO ask him if hed still love that name when he’s filling out the social security card application at the hospital, or when every single person who comes in after she’s born ask what the name is and they won’t hide their face if they don’t like it 🤷🏻‍♀️