Japan Ordered Everyone to Pick a Surname in 1875

Japan has one of the largest surname pools on the planet, with tens of thousands of distinct family names in use across a population of about 125 million. It also has one of the youngest. Before 1875 most Japanese people had no surname at all.

Surnames as a class marker

Under the feudal order, a family name was a privilege. Samurai households had one. So did the court nobility and a handful of other elite groups. Farmers, merchants and artisans, meaning the overwhelming majority of the country, did not.

Those people were identified the way you would identify a neighbour rather than a citizen. A given name, plus whatever context the situation needed. Whose son you were, what trade you worked, which village you came from. It functioned perfectly well inside a community where everyone already knew everyone, and it left no hereditary family name behind.

The decree

The Meiji government had first raised the subject in 1870, with a decree permitting commoners to take a surname. Almost nobody did. Literacy was low, and there was a widespread suspicion that registering a family name was the opening move in some new tax, which turned out to be a reasonable thing to suspect of a government busy rebuilding the state from the ground up.

So on 13 February 1875 the government stopped asking. The Heimin Myōji Hisshō Gimurei made surnames compulsory for everyone.

Japan's population at the time was somewhere around 35 million. Nearly all of those people now needed a hereditary family name that had never existed, and they needed it more or less immediately. Europe had taken several centuries to work through the same transition. Japan did it inside a generation, by administrative order.

Looking out the front door

Presented with that problem, enormous numbers of families solved it by describing where they lived.

Tanaka means something close to the middle of the rice fields. Yamamoto is the base of the mountain. Watanabe points at a river crossing. All three are among the most common surnames in the country today, and none of them carries any lineage, title or ancestral claim. They are locations.

Multiply that across a rural population making the same practical decision in the same narrow window and you end up with a national surname list that reads like a survey of the Japanese countryside as it stood in 1875. Rice paddies, valleys, groves, river fords and hillsides, converted into permanent family identity because they were the nearest available thing to name yourself after.

The age of a Japanese surname

This is the part that tends to surprise people. Surnames carry an implication of depth, a sense that the name has been travelling down through the generations since some unspecified antiquity.

For most Japanese families that is not the case. The name is about 150 years old and dates to a specific government proclamation rather than to any feudal house. Something that feels ancient turns out to be a piece of nineteenth-century administration that nobody ever had reason to replace.

The samurai names are older, and a small number of aristocratic lines go back a very long way. They are the minority. The bulk of Japan's surname diversity was generated in one year by people trying to comply with a new law, which also explains why the pool is so large. Thirty-five million people improvising separately produces a lot more variety than a slow accumulation of inherited titles ever would.