Mark Millar's Moonie denial

In JLA issue 27 cover date March 1999 written by Mark Millar, the Martian Manhunter disguises himself as a Japanese Woman and uses the name Rei Hino.  Bruce Wayne immediately knew that was J'onn because he recognized that name as having something to do with Mars.

Sailor Moon fans immediately deduced that J'onn was naming himself after Sailor Mars, and apparently Batman was also familiar with Sailor Moon.

Thing is Mark Millar has denied that this was an intentional Sailor Moon reference, saying...

"I was told it translated loosely as POET OF MARS, which is what J'onn's occupation was back on his homeworld. It had zero to do with Sailor Moon."

But that explanation doesn't make sense.  Rei Hino does NOT mean "poet of mars".

Hino means "of Fire", the Kanji for Fire in that name is also part of the Japanese name for the Planet Marts, Kasei which means "Fire Star" but is spoken differently in that word.  So in context Hino is a fitting surname to give someone you're associating with Mars, but it's not on it's own inherently a reference to Mars.

Nor does Rei mean Poet, according to Wordhippo the Japanese words for Poet all have "jin" in them.  The Wikipedia page for the name Rei lists many different Kanji and meanings for Rei, but none is Poet.

So either Mark Millar is lying, or someone lied to Mark Millar.  Who told him this name translated that way, and why were they offering a translation of this name specifically?

Millar wrote this individual Issue, but it's actually still during the Run of Grant Morrison.  There are things about Grant Morrison that make me suspect he would like a lot of Anime, including Sailor Moon.  So is it possible the real culprit here is Grant Morrison?

If I described the premise of the Black Moon saga (the Manga version not the 90s Anime) to a bunch of DC Nerds but avoided like names and stuff, they'd probably say "that sounds like a Grant Morrison comic".  But Naoko Takeuchi did that before it became Grant Morrison's thing.

Morrison's key theme for his JLA run was equating each JLA member with an Olympian deity.  So it's easy to imagine he was researching lots of ways those deities were used in modern pop culture, especially stuff that can be considered Superhero stories.