Japanese Female Name Generator

Japanese girls' names tell you roughly when their owner was born. Before about 1980 the overwhelming majority ended in -ko (子, 'child'): Keiko, Yoko, Sachiko, Michiko, Noriko. In the 1980s and 90s the -ko faded and endings like -mi (Naomi, Satomi), -ka (Ayaka, Haruka), and -na (Yuna, Kanna) took over. Today's most popular names are short, soft, and often nature-based: Himari (sunflower), Yui, Mei, Tsumugi (spun silk), Hina, Rin, Koharu (little spring), Sakura, and Ichika. Many current favourites, such as Aoi, Hinata, Sora, and Mitsuki, are also given to boys, so context and kanji decide the reading.

The surnames here are real and weighted toward the ones you would meet in any Japanese classroom or office. Sato, Suzuki, Takahashi, Tanaka, and Watanabe alone cover millions of people, and most surnames describe a landscape: Yamada is 'mountain rice field', Hasegawa 'long valley river', Kobayashi 'small forest'. Rarer family names (Amamiya, Saionji, Zaizen) are included because fiction writers often want a character to stand out.

Names are given-name-first in standard Hepburn romaji without macrons, the form you see on passports, in subtitles, and in manga translations. Flip them to surname-first if your project uses Japanese order.