Japanese Surnames

Japanese surnames, called myōji (名字, みょうじ), are family names written in kanji that come before the given name: Tanaka Yui, not Yui Tanaka. Most describe a place: a rice field, a river, the foot of a mountain. Satō (佐藤) is the most common, with an estimated 1.99 million bearers, and Japan has somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 surnames in all.

Call “Satō-san” in a clinic waiting room in Sendai and do not be surprised if two people stand up. In Miyagi prefecture roughly one person in sixteen is a Satō. That is the first thing to know about Japanese surnames: a handful of them are everywhere, and the rest are astonishingly varied.

How Japanese Surnames Work

A Japanese name has two parts, the family name and the given name, and the family name always comes first. There is no middle name. Tanaka Yui is Yui of the Tanaka family. For a long time Japanese names were flipped into Western order in English, but that changed on January 1, 2020, when the government began writing Japanese names surname first in its English documents too, the same way they are written in Japanese.

The everyday word is myōji. You will also see it written 苗字 with the same reading, the usual spelling in the early modern period. After the Second World War, 名字 became the normal form again, because the reading myō for 苗 was left out of the official character list. The law uses a third word, uji (氏), in the Civil Code, and in conversation people often just say sei (姓).

Because the surname leads, it does most of the social work. Colleagues call each other by surname plus an honorific for years, so the name you hear most in a Japanese office is Tanaka-san, not Yui. Our guide to Japanese honorifics covers which suffix goes where, and the polite speech around them lives under keigo.

A family also shares one surname by law. Article 750 of the Civil Code requires a married couple to choose one surname between them. The law does not say whose, but in 2024 94.1% of couples took the husband’s, according to the government’s vital statistics.

When Did Japanese Commoners Get Surnames?

Surnames began at the top of society. Heian court nobles were known by the location of their mansions, and those labels hardened into house names such as Konoe (近衛), Kujō (九条) and Saionji (西園寺). Warrior families took names from the land they held, which is why so many surnames are really addresses. The Nitta family, for example, named itself after the Nitta estate it had cleared. The famous samurai on our samurai name generator page show how those warrior names were built.

In the Edo period, using a surname in public, together with wearing a sword, was a privilege of the samurai and a few favored commoners. That is where the old idea comes from that ordinary Japanese had no surnames at all. It is not quite right. In 1952 the historian Hora Tomio showed that farmers, even poor ones, very often had family names and used them privately, at festivals and other occasions. What they lacked was permission to use them officially.

The new Meiji government changed that in two steps. In 1870 it allowed commoners to use surnames publicly, but many simply did not register one. So on February 13, 1875, a Council of State proclamation made surnames compulsory for everyone, and told anyone who did not know an ancestral name to create a new one. The number of surnames in Japan is thought to have multiplied several times over between the end of the Edo period and the Meiji era.

You may have heard that panicked villagers named themselves after fish or vegetables to meet the deadline. Those stories were passed around for laughs, and historians now treat them as one source of the myth that commoners had no names before 1875.

The 30 Most Common Japanese Surnames

This ranking comes from Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance’s national surname survey of August 2008, which covered about 6.118 million policyholders and scaled the results to a population of 127.06 million. The survey found that one person in ten carries a top-ten surname and one in three a top-hundred surname. The meanings are the literal sense of each kanji, which is not always why a family chose the name.

A few things jump out. Saitō appears twice, because 斉藤 and 斎藤 are different names that sound the same, so when you write to a Saitō it is worth checking which one. Sasaki is written with 々, the mark that repeats the kanji before it. Some readings vary by family, so Yamazaki can be Yamasaki and Nakajima can be Nakashima. Hayashi and Mori are the two most common one-kanji surnames by a wide margin, and together they make up about a quarter of all single-kanji names. Among three-kanji surnames, Sasaki leads, followed by Hasegawa (長谷川) and Igarashi (五十嵐).

Japanese Surname Meanings by Kanji

Once you know a dozen kanji, most Japanese surnames start to read like little maps. The same pieces appear again and again.

The kanji pages go deeper on several of these: the kanji for tree, the kanji for big, the kanji for water and the kanji for gold.

Landscape names are the largest group. Yamamoto, Yamada, Mori and Ikeda simply describe where a household lived. Others record a direction or position, such as Higashi (東, east), Nishi (西, west), Kita (北, north) and Minami (南, south), or older compass words like Tatsumi (辰巳) and Inui (乾). A smaller group names a trade: Kaji (鍛冶) is a smith, Inukai (犬飼) a keeper of dogs and Ukai (鵜飼) a keeper of fishing cormorants.

The 藤 names deserve their own note. Satō, Itō, Katō and their cousins are traditionally linked to the Fujiwara (藤原), the clan that dominated the imperial court for centuries, and adopting part of that great name was a way of claiming its glow. Most families with a 藤 surname, though, are thought to have no blood tie to the Fujiwara at all.

Regional Japanese Surnames

The 2008 survey also broke the ranking down by prefecture, and the map it drew is striking. Satō is the north. It is the most common surname in Hokkaido and in every Tohoku prefecture except Aomori, where Kudō (工藤) comes first, and it reaches 7.25% of the population in Yamagata. Suzuki is the east. It leads every Kanto prefecture except Gunma, where Takahashi leads, and also tops Shizuoka and Aichi. In Shizuoka nearly one person in twenty is a Suzuki. Tanaka and Yamamoto are the west, spread from Hokuriku down to Kyushu, and each is the top surname in ten prefectures.

Some regions keep names you almost never meet elsewhere. In Yamanashi and Shizuoka, Mochizuki (望月, “full moon”) ranks third. Miyazaki’s top three, Kuroki (黒木), Hidaka (日高) and Kai (甲斐), are all outside the national top hundred. Okinawa is the clearest case of all. Its five most common surnames, Higa (比嘉), Kinjō (金城), Miyagi (宮城), Ōshiro (大城) and Tamaki (玉城), are all outside the national top hundred, and several carry 城, the character for the stone gusuku castles of the old Ryukyu kingdom. In Okinawa, Kinjō is a Sino-Japanese reading that replaced the older Okinawan Kanagusuku.

If you are naming a character, this is the detail that makes a name ring true. A Higa will usually be taken for Okinawan before a word is spoken, and a Satō in a story set in Akita, where one person in fourteen is a Satō, will never be questioned. The kanji for moon explains the 月 in Mochizuki.

Historical and Aristocratic Surnames

Behind the modern surname sits an older layer, the uji (氏), or clan name. Four of them were so famous they had a collective name, shisei (四姓), the four clans: Minamoto, Taira, Fujiwara and Tachibana. These were joined to a personal name with no, as in Minamoto no Yoritomo, and when a later family did not know its clan, it usually picked one of these four.

Court families are the other aristocratic signal. Konoe, Kujō and Saionji are the names of great court houses, taken from the places their mansions stood. Warrior surnames like Takeda, Tokugawa and Date, by contrast, carry the Sengoku period with them, because the men who held them are the most retold figures in Japanese history.

Rare and Beautiful Japanese Surnames

Japan’s rarest surnames are often jokes, written by someone who loved kanji. The surname researcher Morioka Hiroshi collects the real ones, and a few of them are small poems.

• 小鳥遊 (Takanashi). Written “where little birds play,” read as “no hawks,” because little birds can only play where there are no hawks. It began as a playful rewriting of the ordinary name Takanashi (高梨).
• 月見里 (Yamanashi). Written “a village for viewing the moon,” read as “no mountains,” because you can only see the moon clearly where no mountain blocks it. It is found around the old Shimizu area of Shizuoka, which even has a Yamanashi shrine written the same way.
• 臥龍岡 (Nagaoka). Written “the hill where a dragon lies,” read as “long hill,” because a sleeping dragon would stretch out like a long, low rise. A rewriting of 長岡.
• 鶏冠井 (Kaede). The first two characters mean a rooster’s comb, whose red, jagged shape looks like a maple leaf, kaede.
• 九 (Ichijiku). One character, 九, read as ku: “one character ku,” ichiji-ku, which is also the word for fig.

Some beautiful surnames are not rare at all. Igarashi (五十嵐) means “fifty storms,” and in Niigata, where it is thought to come from, the original reading is Ikarashi. Mochizuki is the full moon. Sakurai (桜井) is a cherry tree by a well, and Chiba (千葉) is a thousand leaves. Both of the last two are in the national top hundred.

A warning if you go looking for more. Trivia books are full of what Morioka calls “ghost surnames” (幽霊名字), spectacular names that no one can show actually exist. By his count, the longest real surnames have five characters, 勘解由小路 (Kadenokōji) and 左衛門三郎 (Saemonsaburō), and famous examples like 十二月三十一日 (Hizume, “December 31”) are ghosts. Even real rare names can have two readings. 東海林 is usually Shōji, but in Yamagata, where the name is concentrated, it is often read Tōkairin.

How to Write a Foreign Surname in Japanese

A foreign surname is not translated into Japanese and it is not given kanji. It is written in katakana, the script for foreign words, by sound. Smith becomes スミス (Sumisu), and the name keeps its own order, given name first, with a middle dot between the parts. That is how Japanese Wikipedia titles its pages on Will Smith (ウィル・スミス), Taylor Swift (テイラー・スウィフト) and Keanu Reeves (キアヌ・リーブス).

The Japanese name converter does the sound mapping for you and explains the rules it follows, and our guide to hiragana vs katakana covers why foreign names go in katakana at all. If you ever order a hanko seal in Japan, you will need to settle on one katakana spelling of your surname first.

Need a Full Japanese Name?

A surname is only half a Japanese name. If you want a complete one for a story, a game or a pen name, the Japanese name generator pairs common surnames like these with given names, each with its kanji, reading and meaning. It also explains how a given name dates a person, which matters as much as the surname does for a believable character.

For warrior names with a clan and a virtue, try the samurai name generator. For a name to put under a drawing or a username, the combination of a common surname and a well-chosen given name is still the least forced choice.

Sources and Further Reading

• 明治安田生命 全国同姓調査 (2008), Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance national top 100 with estimated populations, prefecture top fives, one- and three-kanji rankings
• List of common Japanese surnames, Wikipedia 291,129 surnames in the Houbunkan surname dictionary, romanized readings
• 名字, Japanese Wikipedia 名字 and 苗字, uji and sei, estimates of 100,000 to 200,000 surnames, origin categories, Hora Tomio's research, ghost surnames and the five-character names
• 平民苗字必称義務令, Japanese Wikipedia the 1870 permission and the February 13, 1875 proclamation
• 夫の姓・妻の姓別にみた婚姻件数, Gender Equality Bureau, Cabinet Office 94.1% of 2024 marriages took the husband's surname
• Family-name-first order on official documents, JICE the January 1, 2020 change
• 実在する珍しい名字, Morioka Hiroshi Takanashi, Yamanashi, Nagaoka, Kaede and Ichijiku
• 五十嵐, Japanese Wikipedia the Ikarashi reading in Niigata
• 東海林, Japanese Wikipedia Shōji and Tōkairin
• 金城, Japanese Wikipedia and Gusuku, Wikipedia Kinjō, Kanagusuku and the Ryukyu castles
• kanjiapi.dev (KANJIDIC data) the kanji meanings in both tables

FAQ

What is the most common Japanese surname?

Satō (佐藤) is the most common Japanese surname, carried by an estimated 1.99 million people in Meiji Yasuda’s 2008 survey. Suzuki (鈴木) is second with about 1.90 million and Takahashi (高橋) third with about 1.47 million. Satō is especially dense in the northeast, where it leads every Tohoku prefecture except Aomori.

Do Japanese people put their last name first?

Yes. In Japanese the family name always comes first, so Tanaka Yui is Yui of the Tanaka family. Since January 1, 2020, the Japanese government has also written Japanese names surname first in its English-language documents. Foreign names written in katakana keep their own order, given name first.

How many surnames are there in Japan?

Nobody has an exact count, because it depends on whether variant kanji like 斉藤 and 斎藤, or different readings of the same characters, count as separate names. Estimates run from about 100,000 to 200,000, and one surname dictionary lists 291,129. Either way it is far more than Korea, which has only about 280.

When did Japanese people get surnames?

Nobles and samurai had them for centuries. Commoners were allowed to use surnames publicly from 1870 and required to from February 13, 1875, when a proclamation told everyone to register one and to create a new surname if they did not know their family’s old one. Many farmers already had surnames privately before that.

Do Japanese women take their husband’s surname?

Usually, but the law does not require it to be his. The Civil Code requires a married couple to share one surname, chosen from either partner. In 2024, 94.1% of couples chose the husband’s surname and 5.9% the wife’s, according to government vital statistics.

What do Japanese surnames mean?

Most describe a place or a landscape. Tanaka is “in the middle of the rice field,” Yamamoto “the foot of the mountain,” Kobayashi “small grove.” Others record a direction, a trade or a link to the Fujiwara clan through the character 藤, wisteria. The meaning is in the kanji, which is why two families with the same sounding name can carry quite different meanings.