this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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Japanese is more like 'bob from the long field', 'steve from the middle of the village', etc. and are often place references (certain classes had more rights before people had the right to surnames, so a bit different that far back).
There are a lot of surnames like that in English. Westfield, Norwood, Whitmore, Blackwell, etc.
In Danish you get some very precise locations of farms relative to villages and see names like Nordestgaard (North East Farm), Højgaard (high farm, i.e., on a hill), Bjerregaard (mountain farm)
Yep, very true. I couldn't think of any examples when writing, but I often mention that when people talk about how cool Japanese names are "because they have (characters that have) meaning". We have those in English, too!