Japanese Name Generator

What the Japanese name generator does

You need a Japanese name. For a character, for a story, for a game, maybe for a baby.

This generator gives you Japanese names in the Latin alphabet. Pull one, or pull a batch and read down until something catches.

Then stay for the rest of the page, because there is a thing about Japanese names that almost nobody tells you, and it changes what you are actually holding when you copy one of these.

How to use it

Pick how many you want and press Generate. The boxes underneath filter by a starting letter, an ending letter, or a run of letters in the middle. Copy takes the whole set.

The half of a Japanese name this page had to throw away

Here is the thing.

A real Japanese name is written in kanji. And kanji do not tell you how they are pronounced. Not approximately. Not usually. They just do not.

Take 碧. It was the second most popular kanji for newborn boys in Japan in 2024. It can be read Ao. It can be read Aoi. It can be read Midori. All three are correct. The character does not pick one for you.

So when a Japanese child was registered with that name, which was it?

Nobody wrote it down. That is the part that stops you. Until very recently, the Japanese family register recorded the kanji and not the reading. The characters were the legal name. The sound was somebody's private business.

That changed on the 26th of May, 2025, when a revision to the Family Register Act came into force and required furigana, the little kana that sit above kanji to tell you how to say them, to be recorded in katakana for every citizen. The new rule says the reading has to be one that is generally accepted as a pronunciation of the characters used.

Fourteen months ago, Japan started officially writing down how its citizens' names are said. That is how loose the connection is between a Japanese name and its sound.

And it had gotten looser. Because nobody was checking the reading, parents started picking a sound they liked first and then hunting for kanji to hang it on. The results got a nickname, キラキラネーム, kirakira names, from the onomatopoeia for glittery. Children were registered with kanji declared to be read Pikachu, Nike, Pudding, Prince. In 2019 a young man legally named 王子様, Prince, went to court to change it to Hajime, which just means beginning.

So now look back at the names on this page.

They are in romaji. Romaji is the sound. Which means this list contains the exact half of a Japanese name that the Japanese government did not consider worth recording until last year, and it is missing the half that actually is the name.

That is not us being lazy. There is no way to put kanji in a list like this honestly, because Yumi could be 由美, or 弓, or 優美, and each of those is a different name that happens to sound the same. Picking one for you would be lying.

What you have here is a pronunciation. A good one, a real one, one a Japanese person would recognise. But if you want the name, you have to go choose the characters, and that is a separate job.

Which name goes first, and why it changed in 2020

The names on this page read given name first. Yumi Suzuki. Kenji Takahashi.

In Japanese, that is backwards. Japanese puts the family name first, always. Suzuki Yumi. Takahashi Kenji. Same as Chinese, same as Korean, same as Hungarian.

Japan flipped it for foreigners over a century ago, as a gesture of internationalisation, and then spent about a hundred and fifty years arguing about it.

The argument finished recently. In May 2019 the Foreign Minister, Taro Kono, said out loud what a lot of people had been thinking: the world writes Xi Jinping and Moon Jae-in surname first, so why is he Taro Kono in English when at home he is Kono Taro. In October 2019 the ministries agreed, and from the 1st of January 2020 the Japanese government writes Japanese names surname first in the Latin alphabet on official documents. Abe Shinzo. Miyazaki Hayao. The agreement also recommends putting the surname in capitals so nobody gets confused: YAMADA Haruko.

So our order is the old one. The one Japan officially stopped using six years ago.

We kept it because most people arriving here are writing in English for English readers, and flipping it silently would cause more confusion than it solves. But you should know it is a choice, and it is the losing side of a settled argument. If your character is going to be introduced by a Japanese person, in Japan, they are Suzuki Yumi. Swap it.

Taking a Japanese name apart

Start with the surnames, because they are the easy half and they are quietly wonderful.

Japanese surnames are mostly landscape. Not ancestors, not trades. Scenery.

• Nakamura, 中村, middle village
• Tanaka, 田中, middle of the rice field
• Yamamoto, 山本, base of the mountain
• Kobayashi, 小林, small forest
• Takahashi, 高橋, tall bridge
• Nakajima, 中島, middle island
• Suzuki, 鈴木, bell tree

Read that list again and notice you are not looking at a family tree. You are looking at a map. Somebody stood somewhere, described what was around them, and that became the family for the next thousand years.

Given names work differently, and this is where the reading problem lives.

A Japanese parent is choosing two things at once. The sound, and the characters. They are separate decisions and they can pull against each other. You might love the sound Yumi and then have to decide whether this child is 由美, reason and beauty, or 優美, gentle and beautiful, or 弓, a bow, as in archery. Three different children. One sound.

So a Japanese name is not one thing wearing a costume. It is two things stacked, and romaji only shows you the top one.

If you take a name from here and you want the whole thing, go pick the kanji. That is the actual naming.

Starts with, contains, and ends with

Each box reads a different part of the name.

• Starts with reads the first letter of the given name.
• Ends with reads the last letter of the surname.
• Contains searches the whole thing and ignores capitals.

The ends with box is where this list gets strange, and the strangeness is real Japanese rather than a bug.

Type a K into it. Nothing. Try S, T, N, R, M. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Every surname in this list ends in a, i, o or e. Four letters out of twenty six. Twenty two of them are simply dead.

That is Japanese being Japanese. Japanese syllables end in a vowel. There is exactly one consonant in the language that is allowed to close a syllable, and it is n, and it does not happen to end any of the surnames here. So a romanised Japanese surname finishes on a vowel almost by law of physics. The empty result is the language talking to you.

The starts with box has its own gaps. No L, ever. Japanese does not have an L, which is the whole reason the L and R confusion is a cliché in the first place. No C, no Q, no V, no X either. And Y will bury you, because Yu and Yo open a huge share of Japanese given names: Yumi, Yuki, Yui, Yuto, Yusuke, Yuka, Yuma.

Contains is the box worth playing with. Try naka, which means middle, and watch the villages and rice fields and islands all show up together. Try yama, mountain. Try ki, tree.

You do not have to press Generate after each change. Type and the names redraw. And if you ask for twenty when only three match, the quantity drops itself to three to tell you that is all there is.

How this list was assembled

Nothing clever, and that is deliberate.

What sits behind this is a hand-checked list, each name looked at individually by our team. Press Generate and that list is narrowed to whatever matches your boxes, then names are drawn at random from what is left. No repeats inside a single batch.

It is a fixed list, not a combining machine. We are not crossing a pile of given names against a pile of surnames to manufacture volume, because that produces pairings a Japanese reader would find odd, and you would never know which ones. Every pairing here is one somebody looked at.

Everything runs on your own machine, and nothing leaves it.

Choosing one that holds up

Check the era. Japanese given names date hard, the same way Karen and Gary date in English. Names ending in ko, like Yuko and Mariko, read as somebody's mother. Ren, Sora and Haruto read as somebody's kid. If your story is set in 1985, do not give the teenager a 2015 name.

Do not trust a gender split you were not given. Some Japanese names lean, but the lean often lives in the kanji rather than the sound. The same reading can be a boy or a girl depending on which characters were used. Since this list is romaji, it cannot carry that information, so treat it as absent rather than as neutral.

Say it out loud. Japanese has no stress accent the way English does. English speakers tend to stamp on a syllable, and it comes out wrong. Every syllable gets roughly equal weight.

And if this is for a real person. Do not stop at this page. You have a sound and not a name. Go and choose the kanji, check the reading is one that is generally accepted, and if you can, ask somebody who reads Japanese. Since May 2025 the reading is a matter of public record, which means getting it wrong is now a thing that goes on a form.

Questions people ask

Are these real Japanese names?

The sounds are real. Every surname here is one of the genuinely common ones in Japan, and the given names are ones that are actually used. What they are not is complete, because a Japanese name is kanji, and kanji is what romaji leaves behind.

Why do you not show the kanji?

Because it would be a guess dressed as a fact. One reading can map to several completely different sets of characters with different meanings. Picking one and printing it would be inventing a name and telling you it was the name.

Should I write the surname first or last?

Inside Japan, or in anything written from a Japanese point of view, surname first. Japan's own government has done it that way in romanized official documents since January 2020, with the surname often in capitals. In casual English writing aimed at English readers, given name first is still normal, which is why this list is in that order.

Which are boys' names and which are girls'?

The list is not split. Some readings do lean, but a lot of the signal is in the kanji, and we do not have the kanji. Assuming from the sound alone will burn you.

Why does the ends with box keep coming back empty?

Because you are almost certainly typing a consonant. Japanese surnames end in vowels. Try a, i, o or e.

References

1. Revised Family Register Act, in force 26 May 2025. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2025/06/06/language/furigana-koseki-family-register/
2. NHK. Phonetic Readings to Be Added to Family Registers from May 2025. 14 February 2025. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20250214/k10014722371000.html
3. South China Morning Post. Japan takes aim at kirakira baby names with new rules on kanji readings. 26 May 2025. https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/lifestyle-culture/article/3311821/dont-do-it-japan-takes-aim-baby-names-nike-new-rules-kanji-readings
4. Japan International Cooperation Center. Family-name-first order on official documents from January 1, 2020. https://www.jice.org/en/info/2020/01/family-name-first-order-on-official-documents-starting-from-january-2020.html
5. The Japan Times. Let's discuss Japanese name order. 29 September 2020. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2020/09/29/language/japanese-name-order-2/