Japanese rendering of George; also a Japanese name meaning 'admired child'.
Joji is a Japanese given name with two distinct lives. In its traditional Japanese context it is written with kanji that carry specific meanings — 譲二 (yielding, second son), 城二, 錠二, and other combinations — and functions as an ordinary masculine name in Japan, a variant of the more common Jiro or a name in its own right depending on the characters chosen. It can also serve as a Japanese phonetic adaptation of George, sitting alongside other Western names that Japanese speakers have naturalized into their phonetic system.
The sound is clean and compact: two syllables, each a single vowel-consonant pair, with that long-o / long-ee contour that sits easily in almost any language. The name crossed into global pop-cultural consciousness through George Kusunoki Miller, the Filipino-Australian musician and internet personality born in 1992 who records under the name Joji. Originally known in online communities for comedic content, Miller pivoted to releasing melancholic R&B and lo-fi music that found an enormous audience among younger listeners in the late 2010s.
Albums like Ballads 1 and Nectar were critically praised for their emotional intimacy and cinematic sadness, and the artist Joji became for many listeners the sound of a particular kind of late-night emotional register — tender, slightly fractured, yearning. His name now carries that aesthetic weight. Beyond the musician, Joji retains its quiet dignity as a Japanese personal name — short enough to cross linguistic borders without alteration, distinctive enough to stand out in non-Japanese contexts. It represents the growing ease with which names move between Japanese and Western naming cultures, carrying both authenticity and contemporary resonance.