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' kanji for use in personal names ') are a set of 863 Chinese characters known as "name kanji" in English. They are a supplementary list of characters that can legally be used in registered personal names in Japan, despite not being in the official list of "commonly used characters" ( jōyō kanji ).
The list is sorted by Japanese reading (on'yomi in katakana, then kun'yomi in hiragana), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table. This list does not include characters that were present in older versions of the list but have since been removed ( 勺 , 銑 , 脹 , 錘 , 匁 ).
Therefore, to those familiar with Japanese names, which name is the surname and which is the given name is usually apparent, no matter in which order the names are presented. It is thus unlikely that the two names will be confused, for example, when writing in English while using the family name-given name naming order.
Ancient clan names are still prominent today, if altered somewhat, due to those ties with ancestry and history. As you'll see, there are many variations of Japanese last names with similar meanings.
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]
In the name 福田康夫, the family name is 福田 (Fukuda) and the given name is 康夫 (Yasuo). However, to reflect the Western convention of listing the given name first and the family name last, the romanized names of most Japanese people born since the establishment of the Meiji era in 1868
It is preferable that Japanese names be written in the romanized order of "family name - given name" (for example, Yamada Haruo). In addition, to prevent misunderstandings based on traditional customs, "surname - first name" can be changed by using methods such as capitalizing the surname (YAMADA Haruo) or placing a comma between the surname ...
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