Japanese surnames

Abstract

Japanese surnames  

The structure of today’s Japanese personal names is straightforward: they consist of a surname and a given name. By contrast, to read a surname or to choose the appropriate kanji to record a surname is extremely complicated; what is more, the number of surnames in Japan is quite high (they cannot be precisely counted because of their complexity). Even the history of naming has been extraordinarily complicated: in the contemporary Japanese language there are many words meaning ‘surname’, each having a different origin and function in the past. The paper first presents these features of Japanese surnames; then lists the most frequent types of Japanese surnames, categorized according to their origins; and finally describes a tendency affecting contemporary surnames.