How to Create Your Own Meishi (Japanese Name Cards)

Meishi, or Japanese name cards/business cards, are essential to social and business interactions in Japan. Strangers often exchange name cards on first meeting; businessmen (and businesswomen) exchange business cards at every opportunity. Following the tradition will help you go a long way in making new friends and networking with new business associates; you can even make your own meishi for a fraction of the cost to have them professionally printed.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Printable business card sheets, obtainable at your local office supply store or online. Sheets should be designed for two-sided printing.
• A computer.
• Design or word processing software capable of printing to a template.
• A printer.

1. The first thing you'll need to do is design your meishi, using your preferred graphic design or word processing software. Card designs are usually fairly simple; if they're for personal use, they usually have your name and phone number, with the address optional. If they're for business use, you should at least print your name, phone number, company name and your title within the company.
2. Try not to use anything too bright or splashy for your design; subtlety is better appreciated.
3. Check the dimensions of your blank business cards when designing; if you're using a standard card, it should be 3.5-by-2 inches. Make sure to leave roughly a quarter-inch bleed margin all around to make sure your text isn't cut off at the edges. Traditional meishi are actually 91-by-55 mm, but you may have trouble finding templates for those outside of Japan. Standard business card size should be acceptable.
4. Here's where meishi differ from your average American business card; you're going to end up designing two sides for the card. Once you've designed the front side in English, you'll want to duplicate the design for the back--but with all text save for numerals written in Japanese. You can look up many English-to-Japanese converters online or check out reference books from your local library. For the most part, since you'll be using English names and place names, you'll end up writing them out in katakana--the character set used to convert foreign words to the Japanese alphabet/phonetic system. When referring to job titles such as "System Administrator", it's usually safe to use direct translations into kanji and hiragana rather than katakana estimates.
5. If you're designing in a graphic design program, you'll want to save your meishi as two high-resolution flat (no layers) images when you're done--one for the English side, and one for the Japanese side. At least 150dpi (dots per inch) is recommended for print quality, though for color 300 dpi is preferable. Try to use uncompressed formats like TIF, PNG, or TGA rather than lossy formats like JPG. If you're designing in a word processor, skip to the next step.
6. You should now be ready to set up your template for printing. Many printable business card packages have templates online, which can be downloaded for use in most popular word processing software packages. You can either use those templates or create your own using tables. Match your table cells' size and orientation to the dimensions of your cards, the layout of the printable sheets, and the margins of the business card pages.
7. If you designed your meishi in your word processing software, copy the design into each template slot. If you designed your meishi in your graphic design software, import the image of your meishi into your template, making sure to place a copy of it in each template slot.
8. Load the printable business card sheets into your printer. Pay close attention to any markings on the sheets telling you which way to feed them into the printer, and keep in mind how your specific printer normally prints--which side it prints on relative to which side you place right side up in the paper tray.
9. Print out the first side of your meishi.
10. Repeat Steps 6 and 7 to create a second template for the other side of your meishi.
11. Flip the already-printed sheet over, feed it into the printer again, and print out the other side of the card on the backs of the first. You've just created your very own meishi.

Tips & Warnings

• For working with Japanese characters, check to see if your operating system has Japanese language support and if it can be enabled/installed. You may also want to enable/install it for your word processing software, if you're using that to design your card or transfer Japanese text into your graphic design software.
• When translating the Japanese side of your meishi, always double-check your translations with more than one source for accuracy, to avoid any language-related faux pas.