How do Japanese parents choose a name for their child?

Question

I watched a documentary on geishas recently where a young girl wanted to become a geisha. In it, when they were choosing a geisha-name for the maiko, the maiko was taken to a man who then advised what kind of name would be good for her (taking into account the amount of strokes in the kanji characters etc).

It got me thinking, how do Japanese parents name their child? What kind of things do they take into consideration? What does it mean if the parents want the first name to be spelled fully in hiragana/katakana, even if it could be written with kanji?

Please be as detailed as possible.

? · Accepted Answer

Japanese first names also commonly consist of two kanji.( a system of Chinese characters. ). Some given names are in hiragana or katakana  ( Its a writing System ) and not to mention that Most Japanese family names consist of two kanji (Chinese characters)..

For the question of HOW?

The meanings of those kanji are often chose with word that have positive characteristics such as intelligence, beauty, love or light, names for flowers, the four seasons and other natural phenomena, or the order of birth (first son, second son, etc.).

( the name represent the hope of the parent that their children will grown up with these characteristic, Which is also share by Chinese when choosing name for their children )

Some consult a "Seimei handan"  ( a fortune teller for name " ) Its theories center around the number of strokes that are required to write the characters of a name.

Personal names are often chosen so that the stroke count of the kanji in the child's name will be a fortuitous number

PS: The names of foreigners such as me and your are usually written in katakana. http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2048.html  Eg michal :     マイカル  as seen here in the rule http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/english-in-japanese.html

2) Before the introduction of Chinese characters, no Japanese writing system existed. When adopting the characters, the Japanese did not only introduce the characters' original Chinese pronunciations, but also associated them with the corresponding, native Japanese words and their pronunciations. Consequently, most kanji can still be pronounced in at least two ways, a Chinese (on yomi) and a Japanese (kun yomi) way

3) Kanji are used for writing nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs. But unlike the Chinese language, Japanese cannot be written entirely in kanji. For grammatical endings and words without corresponding kanji, two additional, syllable based scripts are being used, hiragana and katakana, each consisting of 46 syllables.

Historically please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name

Edit:
Just found an excellence blog on  "Seimei handan" 
 http://tarchblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/lets-write-your-name-in-chinese.html

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How do Japanese parents choose a name for their child?

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