Why do Japanese people not have Chinese style names, like Korean and Vietnamese people do?

6 comments

1. Not a linguist but as for your last question regarding the Sinitic pronunciation pronunciation, I’m pretty sure it’s because Japanese names predate the introduction of kanji and I guess it was judged easier to have different readings of the same character than to upend the entire naming system.
   Remember that Japanese evolved separately and then simply adopted the Chinese writing system later on.

2. Are you asking why Japan didn’t just completely abandon its own naming conventions to be like China? Because Japan has its own naming conventions is why. Just because Japan borrowed kanji and with them had a huge change to the language doesn’t mean they had to do everything like China.

   There is a lot of history for Japanese names. As always, Wikipedia has good info.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name?wprov=sfti1

3. In layman terms, some of the countries China invaded adopted some of Chinas customs while other customs were ignored or simply not followed for that long.

4. I’ve also wondered this when I was younger.

   after many years, i realized that i was assuming it’s correct and normal for Sinitic sounding names to be the mainstream majority style of names wherever Chinese language was used. That’s a faulty assumption. Many countries historically dominated by Chinese dynasties and language influence don’t use sinitic names in the current Era.

   In Japan’s case, in fact there are a small ratio of families who use single Kanji surnames and double Kanji given names. However, as you may know, Japan is physically isolated from China to some degree, not totally because of ships and now airplanes. We shouldn’t underestimate how much that historically reduced contact between Japan and potential Chinese teachers and visitors, compared to places like Korea and Vietnam, for example. The difference in volume of interaction must have been huuuuge.

   Also, relatively recently, (probably i believe after the Meiji restoration 1868 ish) Japan actively shunned Chinese culture because they were afraid of being bullied by the Western countries, as Qing dynasty China was. Japan even developed a unique Japanese interpretation of confucianism (cuz they couldn’t get rid of it, it was too deep in Japan culture already).

   Because of that shunning of Chinese-ness and other factors, many of the ethnic Chinese people who migrated to Japan over the centuries may have decided to hide traces of their ancestry and changed their names, at least to use Japanese language pronunciation, possibly even changing to completely new names.

5. Because the names are in Japanese.

   They were speaking in Japanese even before they were writing it.

6. Because Japanese isn’t Chinese, it just loaned large parts of it including the characters to write names that they already had.