さくぶん３

にじゅうねんごのわたしはレコーディングエンジニアです。うちはニューヨークにあります。でも、よくイギリスとにほんへしごとにいきます。ニューヨークのうちはとてもたかいですから、うちはあまりおおきじゃありません。それから、けっこんしません。ひとりでいますが、ときどきりょうしんにあいます。しごとはとてもいそがしいです。いっしゅうかんによっかぐらいはたらきます。いちにちにくじかｎはたらきます。たいへんなせいかつねすね。でも、おんがくがすきですから、しごとはたのしいです。やすみにかぶきをべんきょうします。せんせいはゆうめいなやくしゃです。そして、よくともだちときっさてんでいろいろなことをはなします。これはにじゅうねんごのわたしのせいかつです。ひとりのせいかつですが、さびしくありません。

Katakana literary work final

How bad can one's ネーム skill be... ハー～

Katakana analysis final

The first case I will analyse is the title of an album by Yellow Magic Orchestra back in 1993 called テクノドン, Technodon.
As far as my knowledge goes Technodon does not come from any foreign language. Google results for the name also all point to this album. Therefore I would suppose it as a Japanese self-created name, neither borrowed nor original. Apparently this type of words is categorised into Katakana-using words in Japanese.

Technodon's cover, unfortunately with no "テクノドン" printed on it. In case someone wonders about the big cross on the name YMO, it seemed the band got bored and decided to credit itself Not YMO during the 90's after a reformation.

On a more personal account, using Katakana here seems also helps to deliberately create certain ambiguity on the intepretation of this name. Obviously テクノ refers to the music genre. However, for ドン, Technodon's Wikipedia tells me it can refer to 丼(どん), meaning a bowl of food (the Wikipedia page made a mistake for the Kanji here,) "ドン", the onomatopoeia sound for explosion, or even don, the Italian honourific term. In this artistic expression sense, using テクノドン is way better than using テクノ丼 or something else. I believe Technodon is not the only example of such usage.
By the way, this is a fantastic album.

My second pick is the name of a type of Toyota's cars, カムリ, kamuri. The car is named Camry in English, though.
By the first look it seems to be a loan word, yet amusingly the origin of this loan is Japanese itself. カムリ comes from 冠 (かんむり), roughly a series of headresses to worn indicate diferences in officers’ ranks. It is believed to be introduced by Prince Shoutoku during the Asuka period, which is more than a thousand years ago.

Heian period male aristocrat (Fujiwara Koremitsu?) wearing kanmuri, 京都風俗博物館.

Therefore カムリ doe not really count as a loan word, but still Katakana is used here. It seems to serve for commercial use in the Japanese market only (because in the west kamuri is not the car's name). I do wonder why did Toyota bother to create such a word. Wouldn't simply using かんむり in Japan and Camry in the west be better? One possible answer maybe that the contemporary Japanese are not quite acquainted with かんむり, therefore it is better to keep the word simply as a source of explanation rather than use it directly as a line name. But anyways, カムリ is definitely an interesting example of Kanataka usage.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technodon
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/トヨタ・カムリ
http://yaplog.jp/amika-voice/archive/715 (for the second picture)