Officially, among

Japanese name in modern times consist of a family name (surname) followed by a given name, in that order. Nevertheless, when a Japanese name is written in the Roman alphabet, ever since the Meiji era, the official policy has been to cater to Western expec ...

s there are 291,129 different Japanese surnames, as determined by their

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

, although many of these are

pronounced Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct pronunciation") or simply the way a particul ...

and

romanized Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

similarly. Conversely, some surnames written the same in kanji may also be pronounced differently. The top 10 surnames cover approximately 10% of the population, while the top 100 surnames cover slightly more than 33%. This ranking is a result of an August 2008 study by

Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company is a Japanese life insurance company, headquartered in Tokyo and created in 2004 from the merger of Meiji Life and Yasuda Life. The company is one of the oldest and largest insurers in Japan. The Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company is a memb ...

, which included approximately 6,118,000 customers of Meiji Yasuda's insurance and annuities.

References

{{Names_in_world cultures Japanese names Names by culture Japanese culture Japanese