At one time many years ago, because my surname was sometimes misheard by Japanese speakers on the phone, I made a habit of orally glossing my name with “利益のリに是非のゼ. It apparently usually worked, perhaps because most people realized I was not a Japanese native and was giving them the pronunciation as rendered in katakana. It backfired one day, however, perhaps in a way that might give me confidence in my Japanese speaking ability.
After phoning someone and being told that a person I needed to speak with would be returning to the office in a while and would return my call, I left a message, giving my name in the above manner.
About two hours later, I received a phone call from someone asking for Toshikore-san. The person on the other end of the call could not see me figuratively slapping my forehead in recognition of what caused the problem of him thinking he was phoned by this person Toshikore. What had happened was that the person taking my message wrote down not the phonetics associated with two kanji characters, but rather the kanji characters themselves, thereby rendering what could look like—at least to an older reader—the name Toshikore (利是). It was sort of like a dog owner pointing to a stick they had thrown to have their dog fetch it and having the dog instead fetch the owner’s hand. But it was nonetheless my fault; I was pointing to the wrong stick.
I bade farewell to that flawed phonetic device and switched to explaining explicitly that my name was written with two katakana glyphs.
