名前の漢字Name Kanji

Japan has published the ten most popular names given to boys and girls in every birth year since 1912. Read across a century, that record is not really a list of names — it is a list of kanji, used and reused in different combinations as fashions turned. Three hundred and two distinct names appear in those 114 years, and they are built from fewer than two hundred characters.

The fourteen below are the ones that recur across the whole span and that also appear widely in ordinary Japanese, so learning them pays off well beyond names. You can see the full register, year by year, on the names data page.

The character that defined a century#

For most of the twentieth century this was simply how a girl's name ended. From 1921 to 1956 there was not one exception in the top ten — 和子, 幸子, 節子, 洋子, 京子. Then it fell away, and a girl born in Japan today is unlikely to have it.

和 carries both "harmony" and "Japanese" — 和食 is Japanese food, 和室 a tatami room. It is also the second character of 昭和, which is why 和子 climbs to the top of the girls' list almost the moment that era begins.

Fortune, clarity, affection#

Sun, sea, and the words that came later#

洋 is the mirror of 和: 洋食 is Western food, 洋服 Western clothes. 洋子 rises through the post-war decades and reaches number one in 1955.

陽, 結 and 菜 barely appear before the 1990s. They belong almost entirely to the modern half of the register, which is why a name like 陽菜 reads as unmistakably contemporary.

Character, in the older sense#

Why you still have to ask#

Every reading above is the character's ordinary one. Names are the exception: they use readings called 名乗り (nanori) that can appear nowhere else in the language. 和 is normally わ — but 和子 is かずこ. 結 is normally けつ — but 結衣 is ゆい.

This is not a gap in your study. It is why Japanese forms have a separate field for the reading in kana, and why Japanese people ask each other how a name is written and how it is said. If you can read these fourteen characters and you still cannot reliably pronounce a stranger's name, you are in exactly the same position as everyone else.