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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.
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 ).
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]
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.
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.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
'Kana' is a compound of kari (仮, 'borrowed; assumed; false') and na (名, 'name'), which eventually collapsed into kanna and ultimately 'kana'. [3]Today it is generally assumed that 'kana' were considered "false" kanji due to their purely phonetic nature, as opposed to mana which were "true" kanji used for their meanings.
In situations where both the first and last names are spoken, the suffix is attached to whichever comes last in the word order. Japanese names traditionally follow the Eastern name order . An honorific is generally used when referring to the person one is talking to (one's interlocutor ), or when referring to an unrelated third party in speech.