Japanese Naming Conventions

[Liar Game]

OK, so a couple of people have expressed confusion on how to create Japanese names: here is a handy guide/advice/trivia dump that we've plagiarised borrowed from a friend. Hopefully this will help you guys out a little, and help to make things feel realistic and snazzy!!


First thing to remember: Japanese names go Surname Forename, not Forename Surname, when written in kanji. So Nao (直) Kanzaki (神崎) becomes 神崎直/Kanzaki Nao, etc. This is generally a legacy from generations back where a family/clan was considered more important than the individual. Today, it reflects the group-oriented culture in Japan, so is still used in this fashion.

Another useless bit of trivia: Japanese people often refer to one another by surname anyway, unless they're very familiar with one another. Teenage girls tend to refer to each other by forename, though. I guess that's just girls for you. Oh, young children are usually only addressed by their forename, for obvious reasons. If you've read the Liar Game manga/watch the drama, you'll see Nao is more likely to be called Nao by the people close to her, but is always addressed as Kanzaki to people who lack that intimacy. Likewise, nobody ever refers to Akiyama by his forename of Shinichi alone. Like.... ever.


SURNAMES

• Surnames do not generally work as forenames and vice versa, just like the West, surnames as forenames can come over as a bit weird-sounding. There are a few, though. They're on Wikipedia, but I highly doubt any Japanese parents are going to be naming their kids 庄子昌司 (Shouji Shouji). Unless you want to make it your quest in life to have a kid called that. If so, go nuts.
  
• Surnames are almost always written in kanji. It's usually one, two or three characters. Four and five and six kanji names do exist, but they're very rare.
  
• Surnames as they are now in Japan date back to the beginning of the Meiji restoration in the 1860s. When they allowed commoners to have normal (as in, they didn't refer to your social caste/occupation) surnames so they could be ~*~just like the West~*~ or something, everyone made them up either according to occupation, features of the landscape where they lived (Yamashita - 'below the mountain'; Tanizawa - 'valley swamp'), and so forth.
  
• Surnames based on the old occupation/caste system still exist. Otomo (attendant), for example.
  
• Some common surnames are thus:
  
• Any combination of ta (田), mura (村) or naka (中). You can't go wrong with those.
  
• Other common kanji are physical landmarks in ki (木), shima (島), hashi (橋), kawa/gawa (川), hara (原), matsu (松), i (井), no (野), as well as compass directions such as north/kita (北). There's tons.
  A surname ending in -to/-do (It's technically -tou/-dou, but is usually romanised -to/-do). This is from 藤, i.e. the Fujiwara clan (藤原家), who gave the first character of their name to people they liked, basically. Yes, the first character is Fuji- in Fujiwara (and other names like Fujimura, Fujita, etc.) and -tou/-dou in all of the others. This is how kanji rolls.
  
  
• How else kanji rolls - a lot of kanji have totally different readings when they're used in names. This makes reading them hard for a lot of Japanese people on the best of days. An example one of my lecturers has now told us a dozen times now is: 四月一日 - if you've done Japanese, you'll recognise this as 'shigatsu tsuitachi' - the first of April? Because the Japanese just love the crack pipe, it's also the surname Watanuki.
  
• Surnames aren't very... bendy? You can't really play about with them and make up new ones. This is because there are legal restrictions on the names that you can use, both surnames and given names. This is partially stop weirdos like a couple in the thirties who wanted to call their kid 'Akuma'. This is like an English couple naming their kid 'Devil'. That was banned. Also, names stringing two adjectives together just don't happen at all. But we don't expect you to care about that, really.... it might come up in a quiz ten years from now. Who knows.
  
• There are arguments going on at the moment because they want to expand it to add, for example, 娼 (Shou - prostitute), which is not allowed to be used in a given name right now (though Shou is a valid male name, given other kanji use). On a more lolworthy note, looking at that kanji, it's made up of the radicals of 'woman' and 'goods'. This has no bearing on anything other than I find it funny.
  

FORENAMES

• Unlike in Chinese and Korean, you can't smush characters together randomly and find yourself with a real Japanese name. It's exactly like the West in that way: people's names don't tend to come drawn from Scrabble tiles. There are a LOT of combinations, but there are restrictions as well.
  
  
• You can glean some clues from the name's suffix, sometimes. Male names can often end in -ro, -shi, -ya, or -o. Female names, expect to see -ko, -mi, -e and -yo. But keep smart on the -ko!
  
  
• If it ends in -ko/子 (child), it's a girl's name. (NEVER -kou)
  BUT if it ends in -hiko/彦 (boy), it's a boy's. See Norihiko Yokoya for an example.
  (if you see -chiko and -shiko, these don't count - they're cunningly-disguised 子 names.)
  
  
• Both -ko and -hiko aren't very trendy these days; -hiko is considered very old-fashioned. A lot of girls take the -ko out of their name when they reach adulthood (example: singer Koda Kumi was originally Koda Kumiko).
  
  
• Names ending in -mi/実 (beauty) are female. This is pretty common.
  
• Names ending in -ro/郎 (son) are male. This name is often preceded by a number, but not always. People used to just name their kids 一郎 (Ichiro/first son), 二郎 (Jiro/second son), 三郎 (Saburo - third son), all the way up to Juuro (tenth) if you happen to have a clown car for a uterus, and you could probably keep going (Juuichiro?). (You will often see all of these names spelled with a u - Saburo/Saburou are the same. Same logic as the -tou/-dou thing earlier.)
  
• Names ending in -kazu or -ichi (e.g 則一 - Norikazu/Noriichi) are male, and also refers to them being the first son. -ji (紀二 - Noriji) is second son. -zou (紀三 - Norizou) is third son. I wouldn't expect to find a bunch of brothers named like this, however... unless their parents have serious issues.
  
• Hikari/光 is a girl's name OR a surname, never a boy's name.
  
• Hikaru/晄 is a unisex name, never a surname. (We say unisex, the only girl I can name with it is singer Utada, though.)
  
• Kaoru is completely androgynous.
  
• Kaori, however, is female only.
  
• Makoto is also a unisex given name.... technically. (Again, I've only seen it for men.)
  
• Male names are often very, very mix-and-match. Masayuki, Masahiro, Yukihiro, Hiroyuki, Noriyuki, Noriaki, Akiyuki... Masanori. You get the idea.
  
• All of these also have multiple kanji to be mixed and matched in there. Masayuki? He could be 正幸、正之、昌行、雅之、政幸、征行........ there are way more. Oh, and most of these hiro, yuki, aki, masa 'parts' can be combined with numbers in one way or another. And -rou. And in fact -tarou. eg: Masarou/Masatarou.
  
• Some words can be names, just like Rose or Faith or whatever in English. Examples include Kiku (chrysanthemum), Ai (love), Sora (sky), Hikari (light). Obviously girls will get more girly words like flowers and love and sparklypoo.
  
• There are boys with 'shin' in their names and in fact boys called 'Shin', but it will NOT be this kanji: 死 for the reason above about naming regulations. You try calling your baby Death and see how far you get.
  
• Katakana and hiragana in forenames is considered girly. You're nooot likely to find a male name in anything but kanji.
  
• Anime? They make names up. A lot. Again, you try calling your kid Aang or Katara.

And I can't think of anything else. You're probably asleep now anyway. o___o



LINKS

• Here is a list of the five most common surnames per prefecture.
  
• Here are the overall most popular surnames as of 2006. It won't have changed much since.
  
• The Bible. =O A thousand Japanese surnames, with kanji (often multiple kanji for the same surname), and a brief explanation of pronunciation and Japanese 'lettering'.
  
• Jim Breen - for checking name meanings and names in general. If you put name kanji in here, this will generally give you multiple readings of the name from most common to least common. Usually useful to double-check things, if you're a perfectionist, like us.
  
• Baby name sites can be a bit twee, but they're certainly comprehensive. Get inspiration from these, or maybe elsewhere....
  
• Here are some Japanese forenames, male and female, given with kanji, readings and the meanings of those kanji.
  
• Google Image can be really useful. A good way to tell if a Japanese name is real or not - Google it. The number of results (and a quick look at what those results are) should tell you. Make sure safe-search is on, just in case...