What's in a kanji?

We gave our son the middle name of Seiji, after my paternal uncle. Needless to say, I think that my uncle was a great guy. He was genuinely happy and really took care of us nephews, even though we weren’t good at speaking Japanese when we were growing up. But he’s lived something like 20 years of his life in a hospital due to a serious case of polio. And before that he was hit by a truck. I think it’s fair to say that his name didn’t get a fair shake, so I told myself and my wife that if we had a son, one of the names we’d give him would be Seiji. As we signed the birth certificate, we didn’t yet know what the Chinese characters for Seiji were. Recently, when my dad came for his first visit he showed me the kanji, and then we had some fun looking up what each of the characters meant. To our surprise, my kanji book defined the character for “Sei” as “conqueror” and “ji” as “thou”. Hmmm, not really what we had in mind. There was, fortunately, a lesser used definition for “Sei” – “collector of taxes”. Hmmm, worse. As usual, there was something lost in translation. My parents assured me that my grandparents didn’t name their Seiji in hopes that he’d become a war monger or an IRS agent. I guess some assurance comes from the fact that the conductor Seiji Ozawa uses kanji in his name. I guess …