Katakana Analysis Draft

My group found lots of interesting katakana examples.  Most of them fell into the category of foreign loan words, such as キャバレ for cabaret in a Japanese novel called Where the Bowling Pins Stand, or ファミレス in a newspaper article in 毎日新聞のニュース, referring to a family restaurant.  There were also some clear examples of onomatopoeia.  For example, ガーン, representing shock showed up over a character's head in the anime Axis Powers: Hetalia, and a pakino machine in a manga called 大東京ビンボー生活マニュアル(Greater Tokyo Poverty Living Manual) uses the katakana パピコン to represent its electronic dings.

However, some of the other examples are harder to classify.  On the back of a Japanese Red Sox jersey is written マツザカ even though Matsuzaka is a Japanese name which would normally be written using hiragana or kanji.  At first I thought the katakana were used because the Red Sox are an American team and it would seem out of place for only one name to be written in kanji or hiragana when all the others are written in katakana.  To help figure this out, I looked at the Japanese league's jerseys.  They use Romanji to spell the names!  Why would the makers of this jersey specifically alter it so that it doesn't match normal jerseys either here or in Japan?  As it would seem silly to emphasize the only word on the back of the shirt I must conclude that this is a new use of katakana.  One possibility is that katakana is used to demonstrate that the name is not a normal word, so no one will  misread it as 松座だか, "is it a pine seat?" for example.  This would be a differentiation, but neither a true emphasis or loan word, as it does not place more importance on the name than anything else, but it does show that its different.

This idea is reinforced by the title of the manga mentioned earlier.  In 大東京ビンボー生活マニュアル, ビンボー is a native Japanese word and even has its own kanji, (貧乏) but it is written in katakana in the manga's title.  According to Wikipedia, this is partially to emphasize the word, but also partially to show that it is being used in a sense different from the normal meaning.
From this I conclude that katakana are used to say something is different.  Either simply emphasizing or demonstrating some difference, such as a different language or usage, katakana shows that a word is somehow different from the rest.