The answer is "sort of". "Haruo" is formally an Esperanto noun, that is, it consists of a pronounceable series of Esperanto letters [which also in this case happen to be English and romanized Japanese letters] including at least one vowel followed by the noun ending -o. However, to my knowledge it has no "meaning" in Esperanto except as a given name, and the only "Haruo" I know of in Esperanto is myself. (Doubtless there are others; "Haruo" is a rather common name in Japan and there are thousands of Japanese Esperantists. I just don't happen to know of any personally.) So your initial assumption that "Haruo" is a ("real") Japanese name is correct. On the other hand, the "correct" romanized Japanese name that refers to "a Japanese person with unusually polished English language skills and an intense academic interest in the English-language folk ballad tradition is actually "Masato Sakurai" ;-) . I was born in Seattle, in 1954, of NW European (Scottish, Norwegian and English) ancestry, and my given name at birth was, as my legal name still is, Leland Bryant Ross. I was given the name "Rosu Haruo" (let's see if Mudcat can do kanji: ロス•春男 , i.e. ロス • 春男 using a different encoding) during the 1966-67 school year (when I was in seventh grade) at the Japanese Community Center's Saturday Japanese Language School, a place designed to teach sansei kids how to speak enough polite Japanese to wow their issei grandparents. I didn't have any issei grandparents, so the next year I spent living with my family in Tokyo and attending actual Japanese public schools. The name I went under in those schools was Rosu haruo as given above, though I very soon adopted a kanji way of writing the "Rosu" (since a katakana family name is rather unimpressive): 呂須. The "meaning" (etymologically) of my kanji for "Haruo" is simple and straightforward: "Springman". The "Rosu" on the otherhand is enigmatic or stupid, depending on how you look at it; it means "backbone-ought" or "needsspine" or something like that. (Not a normal Japanese family name, just kanji to avoid the katakana, which incidentally are Japanese for LA — a proud Seattleite, the last thing I want to be known as is "LA Haruo"!)

I learned Esperanto in 1970, and for thirty years I was "Liland Brajant ROS'" in Esperanto circles, the whole time lamenting the unfortunate misshapenness of my name. It never occurred to me that in my Japanese name I had a perfectly good Esperanto name already groomed for use. But finally a few years ago when another Seattle Esperanto couple had a newborn granddaughter they were raising in Esperanto, I decided I had to have a well-formed Esperanto name so I wouldn't interfere with Natalie's upbringing when I visited, and at long last the realization struck. I already was Haruo in Japanese; why not in Esperanto? And so I have been ever since. I'm still stuck with several legacies of my "Liland" years: my website is (still) called "La Lilandejo" and a couple of my most relied upon email addresses are lilandbr @ scn.org and hotmail.com, and lilandr @ yahoo.com (though now my primary one is rosharuo@gmail.com.

My very out-of-date and incomplete Japanese webpages begin at this page and this and this one.

Haruo