CL wrote:
> BTW, which kanji would be the "nasty" one ... just for my edification. 

MAI.

> It's a Very Good Thing (^tm) that we didn't get into middle names as 
> that one comes from the other side of her family and is written in 
> Gaelic.  Gave the US Embassy fits.

And so they should. We had the same issue in Australia, people thinking 
that they can introduce letters from foreign languages such as Gaelic 
into the Australian Births and Deaths Registrar. The acceptable 
characters are ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' and -.  Umlauts and other 
symbols from foreign languages are not English.