Japanese Name Generator

What makes a Japanese name real?

A real Japanese name has two halves: the kanji, and a reading that people actually use for those kanji. If either half is wrong, a native speaker notices straight away. That is why I don't trust generators that stitch random syllables together. A name like "Kamirotsu" sounds vaguely Japanese, but nobody is called that and there are no kanji to write it with.

The link between kanji and sound works in both directions. One sound can be spelled many ways: はるき Haruki can be 春樹, "spring + trees", or 晴輝, "clear weather + radiance". Read aloud they are the same name; on paper they are two different people. And one spelling can have many readings. The kanji 一 is read ichi, hito or kazu depending on the name, and JMnedict, the standard dictionary of Japanese names, lists more than ten readings for 恵子 alone: Keiko, Megumi, Satoko, Yoshiko and others. A name is only complete when you have both the kanji and the reading, so every card here prints the hiragana over each kanji.

The state also limits the characters. A registered name may use only the 2,136 jōyō kanji plus a little over 860 jinmeiyō kanji, the extra "name kanji". Those lists fix the characters, not the readings, but after a recent change to the Family Register Act parents must also register the reading of a new baby's name, and a reading with no recognised link to the kanji can be refused.

How does this Japanese name generator pick names?

Nothing is built from syllables. The generator draws from a hand-picked list of real surnames and given names, and the kanji and reading of every entry were checked against JMnedict. Surnames run from the everyday ones on every apartment mailbox (Tanaka 田中, Watanabe 渡辺, Kobayashi 小林) to rarer ones like Kurosawa 黒澤. Each spelling of a given name has exactly one gender tag: 誠 Makoto is filed as male, 真 Makoto as unisex. So Male never slips in a unisex name, and Unisex shows only names that are really given to both boys and girls.

The filters narrow the list:

• Gender: Random, Male, Female or Unisex.
• Style: Modern (today's children: Haruto, Himari, Ren), Classic (Shōwa) (Keiko, Hiroshi, Kazuo) or Historical (Edo) (Ryūnosuke, Yatarō and women's kana names like Kiku).
• Meaning: keeps names that contain a kanji from one theme: Light & sun, Moon & night, Flowers & plants, Water & sea, Sky & wind, Strength & courage, Love & kindness or Seasons.
• Starts with: the first romaji letter of the given name, or of the surname when you choose Surnames only.
• Generate: Full names, Given names only or Surnames only. How many: 5, 10, 20 or 50.

As long as enough names match, a batch never repeats a given name or a surname. If you narrow it too far (Historical plus Unisex plus the letter X, say), you get a note saying how many names match instead of an empty box or duplicates. If you like the surname but not the given name, New given name rerolls only that half of the card, and New surname does the reverse. Enter (or Ctrl+Enter anywhere in the tool) gives a new batch. Listen reads the name aloud with your device's own Japanese voice. The button only appears if your system has one, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Which comes first: surname or given name?

In Japanese the family name comes first. Tanaka Haruki belongs to the Tanaka family, and Haruki is his own name. For a long time English swapped the order to match Western habits. The Japanese government has since asked English-language media to keep the native order (Abe Shinzō, not Shinzō Abe) and switched its own official English documents to it. The media have followed only partly, so you will see both orders.

The Name order switch flips the current batch without changing the names. My rule of thumb: fiction set in Japan, or anything a Japanese reader will see, uses Japanese order. A character sheet for a gaming group that would otherwise call Tanaka "Haruki" all evening can use Western order. Either way, keep one order throughout, and in a story make it clear early which part is the family name. Classmates and colleagues call each other by surname plus -san far more often than by given name.

What does each kanji in the name mean?

Each card breaks the name into its characters: the kanji, how it is read in this name, and its dictionary meaning from KANJIDIC2. I deliberately don't invent a poetic sentence for the whole name. Parents pick kanji for the sound, the meaning, the stroke count or simply because they look good together. A line like "gentle dawn over the sea" is usually the translator's own invention.

Some kanji are there only for their sound. 奈 na, 乃 no and 也 ya are the classic cases. In 優奈 Yūna, 奈 adds the syllable na and nothing more; it does not mean "Nara", even though that is its first dictionary gloss. The card marks such characters "used for its sound". Surnames need the same care. 佐藤 does not mean "assisting wisteria". The 藤 in Satō, Itō, Katō and the other -tō surnames is the fuji of Fujiwara, the great court clan, and it ended up in these family names through places and offices linked to the clan.

Here is one card from a Modern batch, taken apart the way the generator builds it:

1. Kanji: 佐藤 陽翔, with surname 佐藤 and given name 陽翔.
2. Reading by character: 佐 さ + 藤 とう = さとう; 陽 はる + 翔 と = はると.
3. Romaji: とう is a long o inside one kanji, so Hepburn writes Satō. はると has no long vowel, so it is Haruto. Japanese order gives Satō Haruto; Western order gives Haruto Satō.
4. Meaning: 佐 "assistant, help" + 藤 "wisteria" (here, the Fujiwara link); 陽 "sunshine, positive" + 翔 "soar, fly".
5. Rarity: 佐藤 is the most common surname in Japan. 陽翔 has been near the top of the boys' rankings by kanji, and Haruto has been the most popular boys' reading for 17 years running. Both halves are Common, so the name is Common.

Satō, Sato or Satou?

All three are the same name, さとう. They differ only in how the long vowel is written, and the Romaji switch gives you the one you need:

• Hepburn: Satō. A macron marks a long vowel (ō, ū, and in a few names ā or ē), and an apostrophe separates n from a following vowel (Ken'ichi). This is the standard in dictionaries and careful publishing, and it is the default here.
• Plain: Sato. No macrons and no apostrophe. This is what you see on passports, sports jerseys and in most English news.
• Typed: Satou. Every kana is spelled out, the way you type the name on a Japanese keyboard. It is common in usernames and fan communities.

Plain looks tidy but loses information. ゆき Yuki and ゆうき Yūki are different names that become the same word, and so are 小野 Ono and 大野 Ōno. Some people spell their own names Satoh or Ohno for exactly that reason. Editors choose macrons or not depending on their readers. My advice: pick one style for a project and keep it. A cast list with Satō, Ohno and Yuu in it looks as if three different translators worked on it.

Where the names, readings and romaji come from

The kanji and reading of every name were checked against JMnedict, the Japanese proper-name dictionary of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG). It holds about 138,500 surnames and over 185,000 given-name entries. Kanji meanings are shortened from the English glosses in KANJIDIC2, from the same group. JMnedict and KANJIDIC2 © Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG), used under CC BY-SA 4.0 (licence); our derived name list is CC BY-SA 4.0 too. Surname ranks follow public counts of the most common family names, and given-name popularity follows Meiji Yasuda's yearly baby-name rankings. Gender, style and meaning tags are my own work, because more than a third of JMnedict's given-name entries are not classified by sex.

Nobody types the romaji by hand. Each name is stored as kanji with the kana of each character, and the romaji is worked out from that kana: shi, chi, tsu, fu, ji; a small っ doubles the next consonant (Hattori); a macron is added only for a long vowel inside one kanji's reading (or a kanji pair read as one word, like 兵衛 べえ in 権兵衛 Gonbē), so 井上 いの·うえ stays Inoue and is never "Inōe". The pairs ei and ii are left as they are (Keiko). Because the romaji comes from the kana, the two can never disagree; showing "Yuki" over ゆうき is the classic mistake. Here is how some typical names come out in each style:

The list has limits. It is curated, not complete: Japan has many tens of thousands of surnames, and parents keep finding new spellings. If you need a name the generator doesn't have, look it up in JMnedict and make sure the reading you want is listed for those exact kanji.

Modern, Shōwa or Edo: does the name fit the era?

A name dates a character as clearly as clothes do. To a Japanese audience, a teenage heroine called Keiko sounds as dated as an English teenager called Doris, and a samurai called Minato is as odd as a medieval knight named Jayden. The Style filter follows the broad waves:

The -ko ending is a good example of how fast fashion moves. Before the Meiji period it was largely an aristocratic ending; it then spread to everyone, dominated girls' names through the first half of the Shōwa era and has faded since. Today's lists look quite different:

Half of the boys' top ten in that ranking are one-kanji names, and none of the girls' top names ends in -ko. The most used kanji were 翔 "soar" for boys and 愛 "love" for girls.

How common is the name?

The badge (Common, Uncommon or Rare) tells you how often you would meet the name in Japan today, and it comes from data rather than gut feeling. Surnames are ranked by how many people carry them: the top 50 are Common, ranks 51 to 300 are Uncommon, and anything rarer is Rare. A given name is Common if it reached a Meiji Yasuda top ten by kanji or was an everyday name of its era. It is Uncommon if it is a standard name people recognise, and Rare if it is literary, old-fashioned or unusual but attested. A full name takes the rarer of its two badges, so Satō plus a Rare given name is Rare.

For a main character I usually pair a Common surname with an Uncommon given name. The surname makes them ordinary and the given name makes them memorable. Rare on both halves tends to sound like a pen name.

Three of the ten end in 藤, the Fujiwara kanji. The rest are landscape words such as field, mountain, village and grove, which is how most Japanese surnames began.

Saving, sharing and exporting your names

Press Save (the heart) on any name and it goes to Saved names, which is stored in this browser on this device. Nothing is uploaded, so clearing your site data or switching browsers empties the list. It holds up to 200 names; after that the oldest one drops out and the page tells you. Export it first with Export TXT or Export CSV. Favourites saved with the earlier version of this page are carried over automatically.

For a single name, Copy gives "Satō Haruto (佐藤 陽翔)". Copy all puts one name per line with romaji, kanji and kana. Download TXT adds the reading, the meaning of each kanji and the rarity, and Download CSV gives a spreadsheet with surname and given name in separate columns. Share link copies an address that reopens exactly this batch with your settings, which helps when a co-writer or your players need to see the same list.

When I prepare a campaign, I set How many to 50 and switch the style for each faction: Historical for the old merchant house, Modern for the student cast. Then I save the keepers and paste the CSV straight into the NPC sheet. Thirty named characters take about ten minutes.

Going further with Japanese names

A generator gives you a solid starting point, but Japanese naming is flexible. Parents sometimes give kanji readings nobody could guess. The extreme cases are called kira-kira ("sparkly") names, and they have been argued about in Japan for years. This tool only uses readings attested in JMnedict, so you won't get one by accident. For anything unusual, check the name in JMnedict and the jinmeiyō list. For more depth:

• Common Japanese surnames: what they mean and where they come from: fields, mountains, the Fujiwara -tō names and readings you can't guess.
• Japanese names that mean moon, light, flower or sky: the theme kanji with real names for boys, girls and both.
• How to name a Japanese character for a story, game or anime: era, class, honorifics, nicknames and the checks I run before I commit to a name.