The Basics of Japanese Names: How They Are Chosen, Written, and Read

Japanese names for people occupy an unusual niche in that seeing a written name doesn’t mean you’ll know how to pronounce it. Furthermore, hearing a name doesn’t mean you’ll know how to write it — even if you are a native Japanese speaker!

How come? Let’s start with a quick overview of written Japanese.

Japanese, the written language

Japanese uses three scripts for writing: ideographs and two syllabic alphabets (where each character represents a syllable).

Ideographic script: Japanese Kanji

Kanji are borrowed Chinese ideographs that represent an idea, but whose pronunciation changes based on word context. Here is a (incomplete) sampling of one Kanji character’s various pronunciations.

The character 生 has a basic meaning of “life.” It has an especially prolific set of pronunciations.

Phonetic scripts: Hiragana and Katakana

Two syllabary alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, in Japanese represent the same 46 syllables, with no meaning attached to any character. In general, Hiragana, more curvy in appearance, is used for Japanese words and Katakana is used for borrowed words from other languages.

See a full table of Hiragana and Katakana characters here.

Ambiguous Japanese name readings and spellings

As a result, since Kanji is used for the majority of names (certainly all family names), there is a great deal of ambiguity as to how to pronounce names — aka, the readings. In fact, Japanese business cards commonly include the reading of a person’s name to avoid embarrassment for the card receiver, and Japanese people are used to including their name pronunciation in Hiragana or Katakana for any form they fill out.

In the example below, the reading for the name “Azuma Taro” is given in Hiragana (tiny Hiragana above the Kanji).

The table below is just a small sampling of this phenomenon. In general, Japanese has many homophones where one reading can map to many Kanji combinations, as shown below for the male given names “Takeshi,” “Koji,” and “Hiroshi.”
 

Examples of Kanji given names with multiple readings

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Some parents may choose to use only Hiragana (ようこ “Yoko”) or a mix of Kanji and Katakana (ヨウ子 “Yoko”) or a mix of Kanji and Hiragana (よう子 “Yoko”).

Then there are pronunciations for Kanji that are ONLY used for names.

東 means “east” and is normally pronounced “higashi” or “tou” (as in Tokyo 東京), but as a surname it is pronounced “Azuma.”

Japanese nicknames

Unlike English, which has many “standard” nicknames (such as Liz, Beth, or Eliza for Elizabeth, or adding of an “ie” sound at the end (Charles > Charlie, Katherine > Kate > Katie), Japanese nicknames are much more ad hoc. They are often a shortening of sounds in the name plus 君(-kun) or ちゃん(-chan) (diminutive forms of -san, the term of respect that one uses when addressing another person). Or for two-word names, might be combining the initial sound of each word as with "Jonathan Smith" to "Jona-sumi."

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#Nicknames

Japanese approaches to naming

When parents name their child, they might start with Kanji for its pleasing meaning or with the sound of a name, like “Yoko” or “Hiroshi.” It’s unsurprising that the “most popular names of the year” lists show both. Currently girls names which end in -ko 子 (meaning “child”) are less popular than in the past as you can see below.

Below are the top five most popular female and male names for 2019 and 1970.

2019 top five girl names

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1970 top five girl names

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2019 top five boy names

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1970 top five boy names

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Modern names

Traditionally, Japanese girl names often end in “-ko” (子), “-ka”, “n-a”, or “-e,” while boy names end in “-rou”, “-o,” or “-hiko” (with some exceptions). However, as in other cultures, names and naming trends go through cycles of popularity. In the 2000s, many parents chose a reading and then creatively matched Kanji characters to it. In the process, they sometimes entirely ignored the standard readings attached to those characters. For example 一二三 (Kanji characters for the numbers “1, 2, 3” read “ichi, ni, san”) might be matched to the reading “do re mi.” (Yes, as in the musical notes.) These types of names are called キラキラネーム (“kira kira name,” where “kira kira” means “glittery/sparkly”) or more pejoratively, DQNネーム (pronounced “don kyoon name”).

To reign in misguided parents who might choose to name their child “demon” or anything that might expose them to teasing, the Japanese Ministry of Justice maintains a list of permissible Kanji for use in Japanese names.

And, in December 2023, the Japanese government passed a law that will prevent parents from giving their children names with extreme types of unconventional names.

Last thoughts

Given the ambiguity of Japanese name pronunciation, they can be extremely challenging to match between the original Japanese name and its rendition in Latin characters.