I am curious. Does anyone know what the kanji for Ito means?CheersTony

Ito is usually a 2 kanji compound - predictably "i" and "to" (or more correctly "tou" or "toh").Toh is written with the kanji for wisteria - also pronounced "fuji" - and occurs in a lot of Japanese surnames (Endo, Sato, Kondo, Saito, Fujimura and of course the name of my avatar, Norika Fujiwara).The "i" kanji is harder to put a proper meaning on. In this case it's the same "i" kanji that occurs in several well-known place names (Izu, Ise), the Isetan department store and the Kinokuniya book store (where just to confuse matters, it gets pronounced "no"). It's also used to represent things to do with Italy in formal Japanese (Igo - Italian language). It's one of those kanji that everyone knows but doesn't have an immediately graspable meaning...

i: toh: Thinking about it, there's an outside chance that the "to" in Ito is a pronouced as a short vowel - in which case the "to" kanji would be the one for "door" , but that's pretty rare..