In 2009, he wrote: It was thought that a Japanese marketing firm would not try to create a North American sounding brand with the letter “L” because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics.

The Japanese language has three types of characters: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic symbols, each representing one syllable while Kanji is ideogram, each stand ...