Japanese names

Click on a letter to display the corresponding list.

ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPRSTUWYZ

This section gives you a list of Japanese first names with their pronunciations.

The first names are presented here in letters and in hiragana, but not in kanji, because it would be too long to give a full list of all possible and imaginable kanji to write each name. Indeed, Japanese people sometimes deploy a lot of imagination and creativity to find original kanji for the first name of their children. The point of this list is the phonetics only.

Most of the Japanese names use the Hepburn transcription when they are written in letters. The problem is that the Hepburn transcription is not appropriately read in all languages. Foreigners who discover a Japanese name from the Hepburn transcription may have a natural tendency to distort the name because they read it as in their own language.

For example, "Miri" should be pronounced something like "mili" because the typical English "r" is not used at all in Japanese.

This distortion is sometime so strong that some Japanese people give up on being called by their name and choose a nickname, which is a pity because the Japanese phonetics is accessible to most of the people, due to the rather small number of Japanese phonemes.

The pronunciation, expressed in International Phonetic Alphabet, may help you understand how to pronounce the name if you are familiar enough with this system.

Japanese people who write their name in letters may take some liberties from the strict transcription methods, for more simplicity. Here are some examples.

Even if there's no such rule, it is common that only extensions for the sounds O and U are noted with a Ō and a Ū. Extensions for sounds A, E and I are more commonly noted AA, EE and II. We have choosen this convetion as well.