A Taiwanese official pleaded with people to stop changing his name to “salmon” after dozens of people took the unusual step to take advantage of a restaurant promotion.
In a phenomenon that has been labeled “salmon chaos” by the local media, about 150, mostly young people, have visited government offices in the past few days to officially change their names.
The cause of this sudden enthusiasm was a chain of sushi restaurants.
In the two-day promotion, which ended on Thursday, any customer whose ID card contained “gui yu “ – the Chinese characters for salmon – would be entitled to a rotation of sushi together with five friends.
Taiwan allows people to officially change their name up to three times.
But the Taiwanese authorities were not amused. “This kind of name change not only wastes time, but causes unnecessary paperwork,” Deputy Interior Minister Chen Tsung-yen told reporters on Thursday, while urging the public to “value administrative resources”.
“I hope everyone can be more rational about this,” he added.
Local media conducted interviews with people who took advantage of the promotion. “I just changed my name this morning to add the characters ‘Bao Cheng Gui Yu’ and we have already eaten more than Tw $ 7,000 (£ 176),” said a college student with the surname Ma to the TVBS news channel in the south of Kaohsiung city. .
Translated roughly, Ma’s new nickname means: “Good looking explosive salmon”.
“I changed my first name to salmon and two of my friends did too,” a woman with the surname Tung told SET TV. “We will just change our names back later.”
Other salmon-related names reported in the local media include “Salmon Prince”, “Meteor Salmon King” and “Salmon Fried Rice”.
The United Daily News reported that a resident decided to add a record 36 new characters to his name, most of them with seafood themes, including characters for “abalone”, “crab” and “lobster”.