Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names
English should adopt the French convention of capitalizing the family (last) name.  For example, this would make it ABE Shinzo, which would remove ambiguity. When encountering East (thanks for the reminder) Asian (or Hungarian, for that matter) names in emails for example, I'm usually worried about if their "last" name in the directory is their given name and what they should be addressed by or their actual last name.