America may have around a million surnames and Finland the most in the world in proportion to its population, but with more than 100,000 family names now in use in Japan, this country puts China’s few thousand and Korea’s mere 200 firmly in the name-game shade.

Here, in descending order, are the top 100 most common Japanese family names these days — followed by a list of the five most commonly occurring ones in each of the country’s 47 prefectures.

Sato Suzuki Takahashi Tanaka Watanabe Ito Yamamoto Nakamura Kobayashi Kato Yoshida Yamada Sasaki Yamaguchi Saito Matsumoto Inoue Kimura Hayashi Shimizu Yamazaki Mori Abe Ikeda Hashimoto Yamashita Ishikawa Nakajima Maeda Fujita Ogawa Goto Okada Hasegawa Murakami Kondo Ishii Saito (different kanji) Sakamoto Endo Aoki Fujii Nishimura Fukuda Ota Miura Fujiwara Okamoto Matsuda Nakagawa Nakano Harada Ono Tamura Takeuchi Kaneko Wada Nakayama Ishida Ueda Morita Hara Shibata Sakai Kudo Yokoyama Miyazaki Miyamoto Uchida Takagi Ando Taniguchi Ohno Maruyama Imai Takada Fujimoto Takeda Murata Ueno Sugiyama Masuda Sugawara Hirano Kojima Otsuka Chiba Kubo Matsui Iwasaki Sakurai Kinoshita Noguchi Matsuo Nomura Kikuchi Sano Onishi Sugimoto Arai

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