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Japanese names may be written in hiragana or katakana, the Japanese language syllabaries for words of Japanese or foreign origin, respectively. As such, names written in hiragana or katakana are phonetic rendering and lack meanings that are expressed by names written in the logographic kanji.
[12] [13] [14] Such words which use certain kanji to name a certain Japanese word solely for the purpose of representing the word's meaning regardless of the given kanji's on'yomi or kun'yomi, a.k.a. jukujikun, is not uncommon in Japanese. Other original names in Chinese texts include Yamatai country (邪馬台国), where a Queen Himiko lived.
Other cultures use other structures for full names. A personal name, full name or prosoponym (from Ancient Greek prósōpon – person, and onoma –name) [1] is the set of names by which an individual person or animal is known. When taken together as a word-group, they all relate to that one individual. [2]
Nanori (Japanese: 名乗り, "to say or give one's own name") are the often non-standard kanji character readings (pronunciations) found almost exclusively in Japanese names. In the Japanese language, many Japanese names are constructed from common characters with standard pronunciations. However, names may also contain rare characters which ...
Both are generic but possible names in Japanese. Yamada, whose characters mean 'mountain' and 'rice field' respectively, is not the most common last name in Japan, ranking 12th nationwide in 2024; however, it is a mundane name that appears throughout the country. [33]
Officially, among Japanese names there are 291,129 different Japanese surnames (姓, sei), [1] as determined by their kanji, although many of these are pronounced and romanized similarly. Conversely, some surnames written the same in kanji may also be pronounced differently. [2]
Japanese names are usually written in kanji. Because there are many possible readings for kanji names, including special name-only readings called nanori, furigana are often used to give the readings of names. [4] On Japanese official forms, where the name is to be written, there is always an adjacent column for the name to be written in furigana.
Sometimes names of this type preserve older place names. For instance, the character 武 is taken from the word 武蔵 ( Musashi ), which was once the name of the Japanese province in which the city of Tokyo was located, can still be seen in the company names 東武 ( Tobu or "East Musashi"), 西武 ( Seibu or "West Musashi"), and in the ...