Things must have changed since I lived there 20 years ago. At that time, foreigners trying to use Kanji for their names ran into a lot of difficulty.
LD
Hello
LadyDungeness,
and welcome to the WordReference fora! Hope you stay around here and have linguistic fun.
Foreigners I know often have with their kanji names (nicknames, family names, given names) engraved on their personal seals with official power (e.g., eligible for opening a bank account). Seals with katakana are used as well. If you notice that the practise has changed for the foreigners, naming practise for the Japanese has also undergone considerable change over time.
In a larger time span, there was no katakana transcription of foreign proper names about 150 years ago; kanji transcription was the norm then. How katakana come into use, however, may be a topic of another, a long thread.
More possibilities for Kira:
光来 - light, come
喜来 - happiness, come
希星 - hope, star
星愛 - star, love
雪花 - snow, flower <-- I love this one, especially because it's also read as "yukibana", which means snowflake.
The change of Japanese naming practise I mentioned above is seen in the names I marked with red ink. Although there are undoubtedly Japanese people with these names (both the kanji representations and the pronunciation), none of the three (at least to my draconian mind) seems very visible even 10 years ago. They cannot be read as /kira/ by the standard kanji readings or by more lenient readings allotted for naming practise. The other two (光来 and 喜来) are on the borderline. While the standard pronunciations of the kanjis do not correctly represent Kira, the pronunciations are close enough.
Granted that kanji traditionally has been given diverse readings when used in names, recent naming practise has unprecedented focus on originality, so much so that everyone except the parents need to ask how the kanjis are to be read. The birth registration law allows any kind of reading unless a reading and a kanji mean opposite ideas (e.g., ひくい vs. 高).
Whether the parents of a 星愛ちゃん can achieve originality for her or not is way beyond the scope of the forum, but I believe kanji translations of foreign names should at least attempt a transcription (with accuracy possible within the small Japanese phonetic inventory) of the original name. The three "translations" do not achieve that for the foreign name
Kira. Originality and creativity is great but it's just not what people expect from a kanji translation. Even if a day may come that 星愛 is one of the accepted kanji translation of Kira, I say for today, after Dr. Watson that the world is not ready yet.
