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Japan Naming Customs: Difference between revisions
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*Japanese names are usually written in '''kanji''', which are characters usually Chinese in origin but Japanese in pronunciation. | *Japanese names are usually written in '''kanji''', which are characters usually Chinese in origin but Japanese in pronunciation. | ||
*Some names use '''hiragana or even katakana, or a mixture of kanji and kana. ''' | *Some names use '''hiragana or even katakana, or a mixture of kanji and kana. ''' | ||
*Until the Meiji Restoration, Japanese common people (people other than kuge and samurai) had no surnames, and when necessary, used a substitute such as '''the name of their birthplace'''. For example, Ichirō born in Asahi-mura (Asahi village) in the province of Musashi would say "Ichirō from Asahi-mura of Musashi". | |||
*Merchants were named after their '''stores or brands''' (for example, Denbei, the owner of Sagamiya, would be Sagamiya Denbei), and farmers were named after their fathers (for example, Isuke, whose father was Genbei, would be "Isuke, son of Genbei"). | |||
*After the Meiji Restoration, ''''the government ordered all commoners to assume surnames''' in addition to their given names, as part of modernization and Westernization; this was specified in the Family Register Law of 1898. | |||
*Many people adopted '''historical names, others simply made names up, chose names through divination, or had a Shinto or Buddhist priest choose a surname for them'''. This explains, in part, the large number of surnames in Japan, as well as their great diversity of spelling and pronunciation, and makes tracing ancestry past a certain point extremely difficult in Japan. | |||