I can look up the kanji in someone’s name and glean a meaning from them, but I’m not sure whether Japanese people would ever make reference to the meaning of someone’s family name, or whether it’s essentially just identifying sounds that have lost meaning.
By way of analogy in English, there are a lot of people with the family name “Smith”, but nobody really assumes that has anything to do with working a metal forge. I know someone with the family name Yoshidome, which I gather means something like “reason for stopping” — but is that meaningful, or just a vestige of meaning?
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definitely have meaning… as far as I understand –
Yamada – mountain-field – Hayama – Pine-mountain etc etc
is that what you meant?
Family names in Japanese mostly amount to “that family lives out in that field over there, let’s call them Ta-naka (田中 ‘middle of the field’)” or “this family lives next to the river in the forest, so we’ll call them Mori-kawa (森川 ‘forest river’)”. They’re not particularly exciting.