It can be fun to study how Japanese surnames work. One of the mysteries of family names in Japan is the large number of different ones that exist, around 120,000, compared with a few thousand in China and only 249 in Korea. This is caused partially by how late Japan was in adopting universal surnames, which only became required in 1870, and a lack of a specific tradition of naming families up to that point. It’d be hard to imagine a neighborhood in the States where everyone was named Smith, but (as I wrote about a few weeks ago) for some reason nearly everyone who lives around our house has the same last name as us, Yanai, though no one is related. Part of this is due to the fact that we live in a small rural city where no one ever sells their land, because if you sold your land and moved to another part of the country, what would you do with your family gravestone? Your ancestors would be so lonely. One amusing aspect of living in Japan is hearing people with names like 田中 Tanaka (“in the rice field”), 山田 Yamada (“rice field on the mountain”), 井上 Inoue (“over the well”) and 中村 Nakamura (“in the village”) argue vehemently that their ancestors were samurai warriors despite their agrarian sounding names.
Japanese love to believe their ancestors were all samurai.
