No-name is real rock!

I started playing the guitar when I was 15 years old. It was around when NIRVANA started dominating the music scene and destroying the existing values. People made a fuss, saying “Alternative Rock is not tainted by commercialism.” I gave cold look to such fanatical people. I love NIRVANA even now, but they didn’t look new to me at all because they had a name, the same as the existing bands. I know this opinion sounds very strange, though.

Names are practically necessary for anyone, but the young me purely wanted rock musicians to be anti-establishment. The act of giving names for their bands looked pro-establishment. Now, let me introduce real rock in that sense. It’s Souseki Natsume. He is the most famous novelist in Japan (1867 – 1916). His masterpiece is “I Am a Cat.” The story starts with these sentences “I am a cat. As yet I have no name.” How rock it is! Today, let’s dig deeper the power of a name.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Do you know Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? It is in short “language is equal to thought.” This interpretation is not widely supported. Alternatively, it’s nowadays interpreted not to deny all the non-linguistic thoughts. When first learning the hypothesis, I remembered a movie “The Never Ending Story” (1984). As “The Nothing” was devouring the fantasy world in the movie, the inhabitants came to forget everything but their names. I had wondered at that time why names were exceptions, but now I feel like I can understand. Ultimately, without names, we can’t even recognize objects. In other words, everything in the world exists by name.

By the way, do you know why I selected the image of a scene from the movie “Spirited Away” for this article? It’s because it’s also a movie about names. In the movie, all the casts are controlled by taking away their names. Sometimes the movie is said to be a metaphor for the Japanese corporate culture where people are called each other by the titles of their positions, not by their own names. I think that’s well said.

The origin of our brand name

As you may already be aware, the reason why I’m writing about names is to make our brand name more memorable to you. The name, CondeHouse, was created not to have a specific meaning in most places, so that we can be widely accepted anywhere in the world. I’d like it to be synonymous with good furniture in the near future, the same as in Japan. Thank you very much for reading this article to the end. In the narrow sense of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, we today come into the world by your awareness of our name.

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