Some 3,000 miles apart at opposite ends of Asia, the people, culture and history are very different except for one element, having China as a neighbor. 16 – At first glance, the cities of Ulaanbataar, the capital of Mongolia, and Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, may not seem to have very much in common. They were similar to yagō, private family names used by commoners in mainland Japan.Jul. For example, Taraa ( warabi-naa) from Yamagusiku was written as たら山城 (Taraa Yamagushiku).Ĭommoners in rural areas unofficially used names for households, which were also called Yaa-n-naa (屋の名). For commoners, his warabi-naa is written first and is followed by his kamei. Arakachii) while that of a samurai was not (e.g. The last syllable of a commoner's kamei was lengthened (e.g. However, kamei of commoners were differentiated verbally and in writing. At some point in history, commoners in the capital region, Shuri and Naha, started to assume kamei. Officially, commoners did not have kamei. When it was necessary to distinguish branch families, the main family attached the prefix ufu (大, great) to its kamei while the suffix gwa (small), for example, was used for a branch family. In practice, kamei represented a group who shared the founder of a relatively recent past. For example, the name 東 (Higashi) was often changed to 比嘉 (Higa) or 比謝 (Hija), the name 前田 (Maeda) to 真栄田 (the same reading), 福山 (Fukuyama) to 譜久山 (the same reading), etc. As a result, the kanji used to write kamei changed from characters that were common in mainland Japan to new, unique character combinations.
In 1625 the Satsuma Domain instituted a ban on the use of Japanese-looking family names (大和めきたる名字の禁止, Yamato-mekitaru myōji no kinshi?).
The Keichō Land Surveys of 1609-1611 probably conventionalized to some degree the choice of kanji for place names, and thus surnames based on them. After the conquest of the Ryūkyū Kingdom by Japan's Satsuma Domain in 1609, the Japanese-style use of Chinese characters (kanji) was adopted. In early times, kamei were written predominantly in hiragana. For example, Makishi Chōchū (1818–1862) originally had the kamei Itarashiki (板良敷) but was then given a fief of Ōwan (大湾) before being finally renamed to Makishi (牧志). This means that his kamei was changed every time a different land was allotted.
In contrast, an upper class member used the name of the fief he was given by the king. Because the vast majority of the samurai families lacked domains to rule, they inherited fixed kamei. In the naming conventions after the separation of the samurai class from peasants, only the samurai class was allowed to have kamei. For example, an inscription of the Old Ryukyu era contains a personal name, Mafuto-kane Ufusato no Ufu-yakumoi (まふとかね 大さとの大やくもい), where Mafuto-kane (Mafutu-gani) was a warabi-naa, Ufusato (Ufusatu) was a place associated with him, and Ufu-yakumoi (Ufu-yakumui) was the title he was given. Kamei were toponyms, either the domains they ruled or the places of their origin. Kamei (家名) or Yaa-n-naa (家の名), both meaning "family name," were often attached to warabi-naa. Even in the Old Ryukyu era, social development led Okinawans to acquire names other than warabi-naa for disambiguation.