Japanese names (日本人の氏名, nihonjin no shimei?) in modern times usually consist of a family name (surname), followed by a given name. "Middle names" are not generally used. Japanese names are usually written in kanji, which are characters of usually Chinese origin in Japanese pronunciation. The kanji for a name may have a variety of possible Japanese pronunciations, but parents might use hiragana or katakana when giving a birth name to their newborn child. Names written in hiragana or katakana are phonetic renderings, and so lack the visual meaning of names expressed in the logographic kanji.
Japanese family names are extremely varied: according to estimates, there are over 100,000 different surnames in use today in Japan. Common family names in Japan include Satō (佐藤) (most common), Suzuki (鈴木) (second most common), and Takahashi (高橋) (third most common). [1] This diversity is in stark contrast to the situation with Korean names (250 names, of which 3 comprise almost half the population) and Chinese surnames (a few hundred common, 20 comprise half the population), where the long history of surname usage has led to surname extinction. By contrast, modern Japanese family names date only to the 19th century, following the Meiji restoration, and thus have not yet undergone surname extinction for as long.
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