Over 300 people in Taiwan legally changed their names to “Salmon” last March to get free sushi as part of a restaurant promotion, the Taipei Times reported on Saturday, noting the phenomenon prompted Taiwanese lawmakers to debate limits on legal name changes last week.
“In March last year, restaurant chain Sushiro ran a promotion offering free all-you-can-eat sushi for a whole table to anyone with the Chinese characters for salmon, gui yu (鮭魚), in their name. In what was later dubbed ‘salmon chaos,’ 331 people took part, paying a nominal administration fee to legally call themselves names including ‘Salmon Dream’ and ‘Dancing Salmon,'” the newspaper recalled on May 28.
A student at China Medical University in Taiwan’s Taichung City legally altered his name to “Salmon Dream” in mid-March 2021 and subsequently charged strangers “NT$400 (US$14.05) to dine with him under his new moniker,” Taiwan News reported in April 2021.
Taiwan’s federal government at the time was openly critical of Sushiro’s marketing scheme. Taipei denounced the Japanese restaurant’s advertising campaign for inundating Taiwan’s Interior Ministry with a raft of name change requests and creating “pointless extra work for the paperwork-heavy bureaucracy,” according to the Taipei Times.
Sushiro’s short-lived promotion in March 2021 resulted in permanent name changes among some Taiwanese citizens, including the college student now known as “Salmon Dream.” These individuals had already legally changed their names twice before altering them to “Salmon,” meaning they reached the Taiwanese government’s limit of three legal name changes allowed per person.
“After the salmon chaos incident some people had already changed their name three times and now have no way to change them back,” Chiu Hsien-chih, a Taiwanese legislator from the country’s center-left New Power Party, said on May 26.
Chiu spoke during a debate discussing possible changes to Taiwan’s legal name change ordinance in the national legislature, or Legislative Yuan. He suggested “other measures including fee changes and cooling-off periods” during the parliamentary debate. Some lawmakers from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and pro-China opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) called for Taipei to make it “more difficult” for citizens to legally change their names on May 26. Other legislators, including DPP member Kuan Bi-ling, said they opposed an increase in legal name change restrictions. He said such measures would serve as an “intrusion into people’s daily lives.”
“Our trust in civic rationality is too low,” Kuan said during the debate.
A Taiwanese attorney named Lin Chih-chun suggested a method to work around Taiwan’s legal name change limit in a Facebook post in March 2021 during the height of the “Salmon Chaos” hysteria.
“Lin pointed out that Article 9, Item 2 of the [Taiwan] Name Act … states that a person may change their name if they have ‘the exact same given name as an elder relative within three degrees of kinship,'” Taiwan News reported at the time.
The lawyer proposed that a person affected by the name change limit should convince a close relative, such as a parent, to also change his or her name to the same Salmon-related moniker, thus creating a scenario in which an additional name change is warranted.
“This assumes, of course, that the relative has not exceeded their quota of name changes or has only one left,” Taiwan News noted.
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