Like many people, I have a name.
And as a person with a name, I feel like I’m qualified to talk about samurai names back in medieval times.
Full samurai names were really long.
Typically, by the time one samurai has finished introducing himself, the other samurai would
have already committed ritual suicide due to boredom.
Here’s the name of a popular dictatorship founder:
Tokugawa Dainagon Minamoto no Ason Ieyasu 徳川 大納言 源 朝臣 家康.
That’s a mouthful, so he just called himself Dainagon around the office to prevent suicides.
Today we’re gonna talk about all parts of samurai names and what they meant, and along
the way you’ll accidentally learn some stuff about medieval Japanese culture.
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This is called the ujina 氏名 and this is the myōji 名字.
They were the names of your clan.
Now there’s a problem with the word “clan.”
It describes two different things and people get them confused.
The original clans were there at the beginning, at season 1 of the Japanese state.
They were called uji 氏, usually translated as “clan.”
Over time, a few powerful uji rose to the top and grew gigantic.
Their members hogged the country like it was an elementary school playground and Japan was their ball.
By the end of the Heian Period, the bullies took over the playground and almost everyone
was either a Fujiwara, a Minamoto, or a Taira.
Problem was, these 3 uji became too big for their own good.
Being in the same clan didn’t mean much anymore.
Think about it, how often do you talk to your second cousin
besides the annual New Year's call where you both communicate in silences?
Sure, she’s technically family, but weed is technically illegal, doesn’t mean I have to care.
Things also got confusing because people had the same name.
Say you’re visiting your friend Dick from the Fujiwara clan,
and you wave and say “Hi Fujiwara Dick,”
you would get 10 people waving back, because there’s a bunch of Fujiwara Dicks,
and no one wants that many Dicks waving at them.
And so another type of bond emerged among the warrior class, because warriors lived all over Japan,
they didn’t all stay cooped up in the capital reciting emo poetry like the nobles did.
A Minamoto samurai in Kazusa Province didn’t feel a strong bond with a Minamoto samurai in Izumo Province.
Within the clans, the uji’s, smaller family groups formed called ie 家.
People often call these ie by the word “clan” too, making things confusing.
A more accurate translation is “household” or “family.” It’s much smaller.
It included people who lived in the same household, and is usually named after the place in which they lived.
For example, the Hōjō was a household, an ie, within the larger Taira clan, the Taira uji.
Hōjō was the name of this small piece of land that they came from.
All of the famous clans from the Sengoku Period, like the Oda, Takeda, and Uesugi, were in
the ie system, they were all branches of those old uji.
So you can see why using the same word “clan” for these smaller family units makes things a bit confusing.
Armed with this knowledge in our mind quiver, we can look at Ieyasu’s name again.
Minamoto was his clan, and Tokugawa was his household, or his family.
This part is called the ujina, or clan name.
And the household part is called myōji, or place name.
Both can be used as surnames.
He was both a Minamoto and a Tokugawa.
Now have you ever wondered why some Japanese names have that “no” character in the middle and some don’t?
Like Minamoto no Yoritomo has it, but it’s not there in Tokugawa Ieyasu.
The “no” means “of,” so Minamoto no Yoritomo means “Yoritomo of the Minamoto clan.”
It’s traditionally used in clan names, but not in household names.
So when Takauji uses his clan as his surname, it’s Minamoto no Takauji.
But he’s more well known by his household surname, Ashikaga Takauji.
If you’re confused, good, it gets worse.
Over time, households also grew into big, unmanageable families and sons of the same
household moved out to other areas and became their own major families.
But their parents were still disappointed that they didn’t start bigger families like their cousin.
A person could use any of the households along the family tree as their surname,
depending on the situation of course.
Sometimes a father only allowed his eldest son to inherit the family name.
This is called the imina 諱. The first name, the personal name.
It was called imina after the person died.
While the person was alive, it was called jitsumei 実名.
For men, this name was actually different from the name they were born with.
Boys had childhood names.
When they came of age, a new name was given to them or they chose it.
Girls received their first names at birth and kept it for life.
Like hemorrhoids, people tended to keep their first names private, only using it with close family and friends.
Unless you were some well known lord, outsiders did not know your first name.
The Japanese believed that words had power, and names even more so.
Calling someone by their personal name to their face was kind of like exerting a bit of power over them.
Don’t worry though, after someone died, the taboo was lifted and people could
party it up repeating the person’s name like it was 1699.
In practice, they probably just thought it was rude to call someone by their first name.
But if you’re a lowly samurai, call the shogun by his first name and you’re about
to have a bad day.
Even today, the Japanese only call close friends and family by their first names.
This whole secret name business they had like they were all Japanese 007’s is super annoying,
because for some important figures, we don’t know their first names, especially women.
There was a belief that for women, letting slip their name to a man was like giving themselves to him.
Female personal names rarely made it onto paper, so we don’t know the real first names
of most female figures.
The author of the Tale of Genji was Murasaki Shikibu.
Well no it wasn’t, because that wasn’t her real name.
It was just the name of a character in her book plus the name of her father’s government office.
So if people couldn’t call others by their real names, what did they use?
Well they used the tsūshō 通称, of course, you daft muppet.
The public name, or the informal name.
When a boy came of age, along with the first name, he also received another gift: a public
name, a nickname that everyone could call him.
This name could be based on a lot of things, often the order of birth.
For example, it could be Tarō, which means “first son” or “eldest son.”
They often add a character to it, like Kintarō, which means literally “golden first son.”
Or Daitarō, which means “big first son.”
Important people liked to use their titles and positions for nicknames.
Here, Ieyasu used Dainagon for his nickname, which was a rank in the Imperial Court.
Since people had different ranks and titles throughout their lives, this nickname could
change a lot.
Before Dainagon, Ieyasu used Mikawa no Kami, which meant Lord of Mikawa Province.
And he had others before that.
So back then you didn’t call him Ieyasu to his face like a barbarian, you called him
Dainagon, or Lord of Mikawa.
Funny thing was, since it was just a nickname and didn’t have to match reality, warlords
would name themselves the lords of lands they didn’t even own.
It was like calling yourself the CEO of Amazon but you’re just a nobody.
Eventually, especially in the Edo Period, people started using for their nicknames old
court titles that they didn’t even hold, even commoners did it.
This is the origin of a lot of names that end in “...emon,” “...zaemon,” and “...suke.”
This is called a kabane 姓 title.
Not much to say about it because during the time of the samurai, kabane titles no longer mattered.
They were a useless remnant of the past people no longer cared about, like CDs, cable TV,
and reality.
The Imperial Court used to have a bunch of kabane ranks,
some were higher, some were lower, and gave each clan a rank.
Eventually, they got tired of all the ranks except for Ason.
And then almost every clan was given the rank of Ason, including the Minamoto, Taira, and Fujiwara,
and the kabane system became useless.
But a full name was supposed to include the kabane title along with the clan name, so here we are.
Putting it all together, the full name was usually written in this order.
In practice, people rarely signed their full names in letters.
They used different parts of it, usually just the public name or first name.
Yeah, they did sign with their first names.
It was only rude if other people used your first name.
You were able to use it as much as you changed your underwear.
So about once a week.
People didn’t always follow the same order, and they used different names depending on the situation.
If you’re trying to propose a marriage, you may want to sign with your title as
Lord of Kickass Province to show that they’d be marrying into a kickass house,
or you could include your family name if you came from a prestigious family.
For example, here are some names that one Fujita Ujikuni signed with.
For more Japan related stuff to get your history juices flowing, check out these videos.
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We have a new patron this week, Jonathan Bratcher. Thank you so much.
Alright, I love you, and spread the knowledge!