Demographics professor warns that by 2531, everyone in Japan will be named Sato

https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2531-sato-surname-problem/

by zdw • 2 years ago

74 66 2 years ago

11235813213• 2 years ago

The single surname law seems irrelevant unless people named Sato have more sons than daughters.

GolDDranks3• 2 years ago

It's relevant in the sense that it reduces the diversity in names. If the parents could both keep their surnames, they'd have two alternatives left for their children instead of one. I bet that more often than currently, people would choose the rarer name for their children.

kgwgk• 2 years ago

They could alredy be choosing the rarer name for the couple and the children.

11235813213• 2 years ago

Why would they choose the rarer name? People always like popular names, so it seems at best it wouldn’t help and at worst it would risk faster erasure. If Japan wants a legal solution to this, how about requiring the less popular surname to be kept by the new couple, based on official statistics?

green-eclipse• 2 years ago

South Korea has that problem right now. 20+% of people have the surname Kim [0]. 14% have the surname Lee [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_(Korean_surname)

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(Korean_surname)

tgv• 2 years ago

Nguyen:

By some estimates 30 to 39 percent of Vietnamese people bear this surname.

dexwiz• 2 years ago

Wasn’t this caused because when the country adopted surnames, people were allowed to choose their name, and most people chose the name of the current ruling family?

wrp3• 2 years ago

There is a cultural difference that make the situation in Vietnam not so bad as it sounds. In Korea, as in Japan, the cultural norm is to refer to people by their family name. In Vietnamese culture, the given name is normally used.

kouru2252• 2 years ago

I disagree. I believe that in 2531 everyone will be named xxxPu$$y5l4y3r69xxx

zoklet-enjoyer• 2 years ago

How did you know my password?

kouru2252• 2 years ago

Hax

Tade0• 2 years ago

This happens more often around the world than one would think.

My surname can be traced back to a single city where it most likely originated and over generations an additional, informal (so not present in any official document) adjectives were added to determine who was related.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

Just from this part:

Demographic Professor Warns That by $Year, ... Japan ... $Problem

My instant assumptions would be that $Problem = "will have a population of zero", and that $Year would be much sooner than 2531.

karaterobot• 2 years ago

This claims not to be an April Fool's prank, but it has to be a little bit tongue in cheek. To earnestly make predictions based on assumptions about the world more than 500 years in the future implies at least a wink when coming from a serious scholar.

It reminds me of a claim I heard as a kid that I still think about today. This was a few years after Elvis died. It went something like "before his death in 1977, there were less than 100 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1980, there were more than 10,000. If this trend continues, the entire biomass of the Earth will be composed of Elvis impersonators by the year 2000". This was obviously a joke, and is not even pointing out a fallacy relevant to the subject of the article, but I thought it was cute.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

It was actually about to happen, but thanks to a heroic effort from 1995-1999 we did avert the "Y2K Elvis Problem"

throwup238• 2 years ago

I did my part! I was working at the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the time and wrote a script to update 10 million rows in their occupation database from "Elvis impersonator" to "software developer" (I think that's what started the dot-com boom)

Now it's just a cron job they run once a month.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

compare "Why are we not all called Smith?" https://books.google.ch/books?id=wUdtVHBr-OQC&pg=PA413&lpg=P...

tivert2• 2 years ago

There are big gaps in the preview for that chapter, but I found this marvelous quote, which I think describes some big elements of Hacker News perfectly (emphasis mine):

However, endless population expansion has not been possible for animal species in the mast, and only the kind of wild-eyed enthusiast who frequents science fiction conferences and a certain kind of economics department believe it will be possible for the human race to expand endlessly.

junar• 2 years ago

Another article mentions: "The project is a part of a campaign, designed to coincide with April Fools’ Day, to raise awareness of the implications of not amending the law requiring married couples to share the same surname."

https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/04/01/japan/society/sato-...

B1FF_PSUVM• 2 years ago

If this trend continues

My favorite one is that half the US labor by mid-XX century would be telephone switchboard operators. (Fuzzy numbers.)

ptx• 2 years ago

The impression I got from the article is that it's a gimmick to bring attention to the law that forces married couples to adopt the same surname and get that changed.

diggan• 2 years ago

including the assumption that Japan never amends their law that mandates married couples share the same surname. In fact, Japan is the only country with a law forcing couples to adopt the same surname after marriage.

Not familiar with Japan, Japanese or Japanese culture, is this true? If it's true, what is the arguments for having such a law?

klyrs• 2 years ago

I'm aware of some weirdness in Icelandic law governing naming: https://island.is/en/name-giving

I'm also told that Polish law has some strict limitations on baby names.

My understanding of both is that they want to preserve their culture. Feels like a weird kneejerk to me, raised in a culture where it's normal to just invent new spellings for old names.

Scoundreller• 2 years ago

France used to have a list you would have to choose from, until 1993. Lots of other laws in different countries, but Poland not mentioned on Wikipedia’s page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law

tivert2• 2 years ago

Feels like a weird kneejerk to me, raised in a culture where it's normal to just invent new spellings for old names.

Let me guess, you're an American (or Canadian, etc.)?

One annoying tic that Americans frequently have, when encountering a cultural difference (outside a few specific superficial areas like food), is they take the position that the American way is the right way and any other ways are less than. They frequently do this while simultaneously professing how tolerant and accepting they are of other cultures.

Basically, I feel Americans really want cultural difference eliminated in favor of a bland, AirSpace [1] liberalism, except for some funny hats and exotic Instagrammable cuisine.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-..., https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-...

scotty79• 2 years ago

Polish law has some strict limitations on baby names

It's not that strict. It's basically ensuring that if you want to give your child a name it will need to be actual human name (recognizable as a name in Poland) not something offensive or random. It's basically a law to prevent parents from harming their children by naming them something retarded they found fashionable at the time.

It's enough that you burdened your child with life. Further harming it with a weird "name", the Polish law considers a bit much.

You can download a list of names of living Polish people who have national id number assigned (everybody?) here: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/1667,lista-imion-wystepujacyc...

It doesn't contain names that only a single citizen has.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 2 years ago

I'd believe it just because it's not the only oddity about family records and naming in Japan.

In Japan, the public, legal family records track children by gender-specific birth order, e.g. "First son, first daughter, second son".

If your first 'son' later needs to change gender this is a bad relational database problem! You can't have two first daughters since they aren't twins. The trans daughter can't be added as a second daughter, because then the age order would be wrong and there would be no first son. You'd have to either wipe out the ordering or bump up the second son to first son, and first daughter down to second, making them useless as primary keys. I don't remember how Japan typically solves this.

It's funny because in America, to my knowledge we don't even track that, it doesn't matter. It's just a Japanese tradition that only worked while everyone was presumed to be cis.

For us in America, only the parent-child relationship is tracked, by birth certificates, and luckily most people live in states where those can be amended. (I don't like changing a historical record, but otherwise I'd have to haul around name change receipts to anyone who wonders why my legal gender and name on some documents doesn't match other documents, and it's just a PITA)

I think I learned it from the English translation of "The bride was a boy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_Was_a_Boy

IIllIlII• 2 years ago

That just sounds like yet another reason not to organize society around 'gender identity' in lieu of sex. It leads to so many nonsensical and illogical outcomes, just to uphold this ideologically-driven legal fiction.

bunderbunder• 2 years ago

Yes. Here's a recent Guardian article that talks about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/20/japan-married-...

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

Standardization almost always increases efficiency at the tradeoff of individual freedom (I can choose my last name)

starttoaster• 2 years ago

Curious what efficiency improvements are enabled by standardizing on married surnames. Maybe nurses at hospitals never need to request to see your marriage license if you have the same surname? And besides that...?

This is coming from a somewhat anecdotal place. But as a married person in the US whose partner didn't change names, it's not been an issue at any point in the last 10 years of marriage. Not once have I had to explain to someone "oh yeah, we're legally married." If anything, in our case so far it would have been inefficient for us to go through the time filing paperwork to get one of our names changed to the other's. Which, is exactly why we never bothered in the first place. What a waste of time (in our eyes.)

TonyCoffman• 2 years ago

This is an artifact of how the Japanese system works. In a nutshell, they track households (families) with individuals as sub records of the family record.

Everybody on the family register record shares the same surname. Non-citizens are listed as distrinct references (for foreign spouses and the like) and they may have a different surname from the household record.

There is more to it than this but that is the key thing to know about the system.

mathgradthrow• 2 years ago

Sato is simply the fittest surname. We shouldn't fight evolution.

gwervc• 2 years ago

Certainly not from a dietetic point of view.

sheepdestroyer• 2 years ago

Sure, but you also have to take the toponymic pov where it does

teitoklien• 2 years ago

Ongoing Satolution of Japan

elzbardico• 2 years ago

Yeah, the couple thousand japanese folks by 2351 given the current demographic trends.

bcatanzaro• 2 years ago

The graph he shows assumes a strict exponential growth. It's rather hilarious to see a projection that assumes a phenomenon will be at its fastest rate of change when it hits the strict limit (100% of the population). If he would project with a sigmoid growth curve he would get a different answer (much more plausible), but it would be less fun (definitely later than 2531).

johnklos• 2 years ago

This reminds me of a fortune(6):

    In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has
    shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles.  Therefore ... in the
    Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million
    three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years
    from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
    ... There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such
    wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
    fact.
                -- Mark Twain

jp57• 2 years ago

Given current demographic trends, by 2531, the sole remaining person in Japan will be named Sato.

ithkuil3• 2 years ago

Which is not incompatible with what the title said.

yowzadave• 2 years ago

Could this problem be solved by using the old Scandinavian family name etymology (i.e., patronymic/matronymic surnames rather than heritable family names)?

inawarminister• 2 years ago

Wouldn't the Arabic naming tradition, having patronymic, location (like German noble names), and 'nicknames' be more of a solution?

e.g. Jason Brahamsson "the Tall" of West London

kgwxd• 2 years ago

Look out trees, your days are numbered.

svara2• 2 years ago

Everyone has a surname, and as long as there is more than one surname, each surname has a non zero chance of going extinct. Therefore, in the long run, we'll all share the same surname.

Sharlin• 2 years ago

Everyone has a surname

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

svara2• 2 years ago

That's not the only problem with my logic though ;) It's in fact the smaller one, since the rare blank surname are likely to go extinct given enough time.

ithkuil3• 2 years ago

What's the likelihood of uncorrected mispellings of last names? That could AGM generative torte that counteracts the effect

hulitu• 2 years ago

Demographics professor warns that by 2531, everyone in Japan will be named Sato

I though they will be named San. /s

Demographics professor warns that by 2531, everyone in Japan will be named Sato

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