The government of Japan doesn’t release official baby name rankings, but, in late 2019, the Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Co. released the results of its annual baby name survey. The survey covered the first nine months of 2019 and accounted for 8,407 baby girls and 8,455 baby boys (so: less than 2% of the total number of births in Japan).
According to Meiji Yasuda, the top names in Japan in 2019 were Rin and Ren.
Here are the top five names for per gender:
Girl Names
- Rin, meaning “dignified”
- Himari
- Yua
- An
- Tsumugi
Boy Names
- Ren, meaning “lotus”
- Haruto & Arata [2-way tie]
- Minato
- Aoi
- Ritsu
Ren was also the top boy name in 2018.
The Reiwa era began in Japan on May 1, 2019, but apparently the era-change did not have a strong influence on baby names:
In the past, there had been a trend to name babies using characters from the new era name, but no such names made the top 10 this year, suggesting that this trend may have weakened.
The name Reiwa (“using the same characters as the current era name”) only managed to rank 600th for boys in 2019. In fact, no name containing the kanji for “rei” made the top 100 for either gender — though names with the kanji for “wa” did pop up in the top 100 for both genders.
Sources: Rin and Ren most popular baby names of 2019: survey, Rin, Ren top Japanese baby names in 2019; kanji from new era name less prevalent: poll, Japan’s Deaths Exceed Births by Half a Million in 2019
Image: Adapted from Flag of Japan (public domain)
