Japanese Male Name Generator

Japanese male names fall into recognisable generations, and the quickest way to make a character feel real is to match the name to his age. Boys born since the 2000s tend to have short, bright two-syllable names such as Haruto, Minato, Ren, Aoi, Sota and Riku, often written with kanji for sky, sun, sea or flight. Men born in the Showa era (1926 to 1989) are far more likely to be Hiroshi, Takeshi, Kazuo or Kenji, or to carry the -o, -hiro, -yuki and -aki endings of names like Masao, Kazuhiro, Hiroyuki and Toshiaki. Older and historical names use birth-order elements (Ichiro, Jiro, Saburo for first, second and third sons) or the Edo-period endings -nosuke, -taro, -jiro and -bei, as in Shinnosuke, Kotaro, Kojiro and Kanbei.

Every name here is written given name first, family name second, the order most English speakers expect, though in Japan it is reversed. Surnames are drawn from the most common families (Sato, Suzuki, Takahashi, Tanaka, Watanabe) down to rarer regional names and a cluster of distinctive Okinawan surnames such as Higa, Kinjo and Shimabukuro. Use the list for novels, manga and anime original characters, game avatars, or simply to see how Japanese names are built.