Oshima is asteroid #5592 and also known as 1990 VB4. Oshima was discovered by Suzuki Kenzō (鈴木 憲蔵) and Urata Takeshi (浦田 武) at the observatory in Toyota City. Oshima belongs to the Hirayama-family Veritas.

Oshima is named after the Japanese astronomer Ōshima Yoshiaki (大島 良明). He is a member of the Japan Spaceguard Association (JSGA) or nihon supēsugādo kyōkai (日本スペースガード協会), which is one of many non-profit organizations engaged in monitoring Near Earth Asteroids. Ōshima Yoshiaki (大島 良明) has already discovered tens of asteroids, but only few of them are named yet. This is everything, which is publicly known about this Japanese astronomer. So linguistics becomes an even more important factor for the analysis.

Ōshima (大島) would be more honestly transcribed as ooshima and means big island. It is the name of several persons, but also the name of some places. In my article on Ojima you can find the variant O(o)jima (大島) as a place name. It is a railway station and written with the exact same characters as Ooshima (大島), which is the name of some islands instead. The different transcriptions are a result of different pronunciations here and these are a special case of sandhi in the Japanese language. Actually shima (島) is the word for island. When attached to another word, then it can change to –jima, but it obviously doesn’t need to do so. Only this little difference made it possible to name two asteroids this way. Urata Takeshi (浦田 武) is a co-discoverer of both of them! Hence I had to clarify the possible confusion and had thus to include Oshima too.

Ooshima most often means the island Amami-Ooshima (奄美大島). This island is famous for handwoven silk. So Amami-Ooshima and also Ōshima (大島) are sometimes as synonyms for handwoven silk. This is an indirect meaning only. But even with this can Oshima hardly serve as more than a place name asteroid (and this already only because Japanese family names imitate place names) or a person name asteroid.