I don't really think so - I think it's more about asserting that the name ordering does hold meaningful and legitimate significance for people who are native Japanese.
For comparison, consider the loan word in English, "Sushi". No one in English would consider calling it by the name "Raw Fish and Rice" because the term "Sushi" implies a specific cultural context and carries the connection to Japan, Japanese culture and history etc. Trying to take the word "Sushi" away from the concept of "Sushi" would be almost rude, as it is de-valuing the social context that it is connected with.
By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name. Deciding to use the traditional ordering isn't about telling other languages how they're supposed to work, it's about asking other people to acknowledge your cultural context as legitimate and equal to their own.
The decision to do this now may well, in this case, be steeped in nationalist sentiment as the article implies.
But the optimistic view is that the name order normalization is motivated primarily by the desire to minimize confusion among speakers of the language in question (in this case, English). Using the Western name order for Japanese names in English could simply be a straightforward way to translate names without requiring a lot of additional explanation to English speakers. That’s the same reason we almost always transliterate the Japanese names in English, and I don’t see much argument to stop doing that.
To me it seems like a better idea is to promulgate the convention of uppercasing the English family name in contexts where different name orders are likely to appear. I believe I have seen that convention on TV broadcasts of the Olympics, and it seems like a good idea.
> By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name.
As mentioned in the article, only the Japanese do this. (Well, Hungarians do too, but they're not even West Asian.) East Asians except for the Japanese do not reorder their names. Normal practice for a Chinese person would be to use an English name in English contexts.
That’s definitely true, and I suspect many English speakers are unaware of this. How many American basketball fans know that Yao is the family name of Yao Ming?
For comparison, consider the loan word in English, "Sushi". No one in English would consider calling it by the name "Raw Fish and Rice" because the term "Sushi" implies a specific cultural context and carries the connection to Japan, Japanese culture and history etc. Trying to take the word "Sushi" away from the concept of "Sushi" would be almost rude, as it is de-valuing the social context that it is connected with.
By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name. Deciding to use the traditional ordering isn't about telling other languages how they're supposed to work, it's about asking other people to acknowledge your cultural context as legitimate and equal to their own.
The decision to do this now may well, in this case, be steeped in nationalist sentiment as the article implies.