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- Anjal Prakash, the former research director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy

I'd also like to elevate this linked study from the article:

Hawthorn

In the Japanese of the past, rather than using the phonetic katakana alphabet to write the names of foreign places as is done now, each locale was assigned its own kanji exonym, which carried a specific meaning, but also conveyed the way it sounded to the ear. Berlin, for example, was 伯林: “chief” and “grove”; Cologne was 歌倫: “song” and “ethics.” Dresden was 徳停: “virtue” and “stop”; Munich was 民顕: “citizens” and “appear.” These kanji, chosen because they most closely matched the sounds of the word, changed one’s impression of a place in a peculiar way—sometimes delightfully so. Thus for me, Berlin’s kanji painted a picture of forests owned by the Margraf—the military governor of the border provinces—which would stage great hunts in fall, and the forests would be dotted by horses that galloped through at the sound of a whistle or the bark of a dogs. In the music festival in Cologne, its name indicated, the judging would be carried out on the basis of both musical talent and moral virtue. Then there was Dresden, where monks were plotting a mass escape, and Munich, where a popular movement had caught on and had turned revolutionary. My internal map was colored by the scraps of the narrative that these Japanese place names projected onto it. In this old schema, Göttingen was written as moon, sink, plain—an open plain into which the moon was sinking. This beautiful, somehow melancholy combination of characters resonated with the Japanese fixations with the moon and with nature. Written in kanji, the name—月沈原—carried within it the power to spirit one away to a far-off location. The row of three quiet letters seemed to me both like a mask that the city had worn, and another face of the city woven into the fabric of time.

"Cluster of octopus (Octopus hummelincki) eggs."

Thomas Barlow And Connor Gibbons

Columbia University Department of Neurobiology and Behavior New York, New York, USA