Kawamura
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘river village’; found throughout Japan and the Ryukyu Islands
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
/ˌkaʊɑˈmʊɹə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kawamura is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in Japan than in any other country.
- JPJapan≈1 in 1.3K(inferred from the name graph)
- USUnited States1 in 250K
- EEEstonia≈1 in 88K
carrying the name, as counted by its national register where one exists and as Mondonomo estimates it elsewhere (marked ≈ and "est." on hover). One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- Japan (inferred from the name graph)
- Sources
- 152 (measured from records)
- ≈1 in 1.3K (inferred from the name graph)
≈97,000 people, est.
Highest-authority source
Japan, est.
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘river village’; found throughout Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. One family of samurai is from Satsuma (now Kagoshima prefecture). Written two ways, one way is more common in west-central Japan.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 2 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kawamura counted together with the spellings and other-language forms grouped with it. Where a register counted another spelling, the row names it.
Sorted by bearers: national registers' counts, and Mondonomo's estimates (≈, est.) where no register counts.
| Country | Most common spelling | Sources | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| JP Japan | #248 | ≈97,000 est. | ≈1 in 1.3K | listed | Kawamura | 138 |
| US United States | — | 1,330 | 1 in 250K | 1.3K | Kawamura | 152 |
| BR Brazil | — | 936 | 1 in 226K | 936 | — | — |
| CA Canada | — | ≈190 est. | ≈1 in 202K | — | Kawamura | 25 |
| IT Italy | — | ≈130 est. | ≈1 in 473K | — | Kawamura | 3 |
| BO Bolivia | — | ≈82 est. | ≈1 in 142K | — | Kawamura | 4 |
| FI Finland | — | 39 | 1 in 143K | 39 | — | 3 |
| EE Estonia | — | ≈14 est. | ≈1 in 88K | listed | — | 3 |
Exact figures are national registers' own counts, while figures marked ≈ and est. are Mondonomo’s estimates, counted from our sources and calibrated against those registers; hover one for how far to trust it in that country. A dash means neither exists.
Registers cited: the japanese-names-oneill-1972 register; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup). Figures without a register are Mondonomo estimates; see Methodology.
Country figures for a list of names, at full precision, are available under licence rather than by scraping this table (how that works).
Notable people with this name(measured from records)
- Takeo Kawamurab. 1942JPJapanese politician
- Takashi Kawamurab. 1948JPJapanese politician (born 1948)
- Maria Kawamurab. 1961JPJapanese voice actress, singer and actress
- Ken Kawamurab. 1968JPJapanese keyboardist
- Ryuichi Kawamurab. 1970JPJapanese singer, actor, music producer, novelist
- Kaori Kawamurab. 1971JPJapanese singer, lyricist, actor (1971-2009)
- Hikaru Kawamurab. 1979JPJapanese gravure idol
- Genki Kawamurab. 1979JPJapanese writer and filmmaker (b. 1979)
- Rika Kawamurab. 1982JPJapanese actress and model
- Takumu Kawamurab. 1999JPJapanese association football player
The ten people covered by the most Wikipedia language editions — a proxy for cross-cultural notability, which favours historical and Western figures over equally prominent contemporary ones — shown by birth year. Source: Wikidata (CC0).
How to address them(machine-generated)
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 20 sources across 13 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 1.3K | #20,230 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 1.3K | #20,088 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 1.3K | #18,965 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 936 | #9,863 |
| FI Finland | DVV — Nimipalvelu (Finnish name service, per-name lookup) | — | 39 | #28,219 |
| JP Japan | Japanese Names (O'Neill, 1972) | — | — | — |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 3
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wikipedia surname tokens
- Wikidata name items (native-script + romanized given/family names)
These works list the name; their figures are licensed and are not reproduced here.
Register rows as of the 2026-10-09 data build.
Frequently asked questions
- Where does the name Kawamura come from?
- ‘river village’; found throughout Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. One family of samurai is from Satsuma (now Kagoshima prefecture). Written two ways, one way is more common in west-central Japan. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Kawamura?
- A machine transcription gives /ˌkaʊɑˈmʊɹə/ (IPA) for Japanese.
- What does the name Kawamura mean?
- Recorded meaning: ‘river village’; found throughout Japan and the Ryukyu Islands.
- In which country does Kawamura have the most bearers?
- Mondonomo estimates about 97 thousand people named Kawamura in Japan, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kawamura.
- How common is the name Kawamura?
- In the United States, the national register counted 1,330 people named Kawamura in 2010, about 1 in 250 thousand residents.
- How common is Kawamura compared with other names?
- In Japan, Kawamura is the 248th most common surname of 142,159 surnames recorded there.
What do you want to know about Kawamura?
Nobody replies to these one by one, but what readers ask decides what these pages answer next.
Query this name via API
curl -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" https://api.mondonomo.ai/api/v1/name-graph/kawamuraThe payload this page is built from: spellings and scripts, countries and languages, related names, and the registers that attest the form. It takes a free API key (1,000 requests a day), which returns what this page shows everyone; the full country table, every register citation and the year-by-year series come with a licensed key, as does bulk access.
About this data
measured from records inferred from the name graph machine-generated
These figures come from the data snapshot of and will change as it is rebuilt.
Statistics are aggregated from the Mondonomo name corpus; related names and etymology are inferred from the name graph; pronunciation and any machine-marked transliterations are model-generated. Read how the numbers are made, including their known failure modes, and where the data comes from.
Reference works we consult — surname dictionaries, official name registers, Wikidata and Wiktionary — are named directly, beside the claims they support. The per-country source counts also include datasets of person records: we publish how many there are and their authority tier, but not their names.
Cite this page Mondonomo, “Kawamura” — the 248th most common surname in Japan. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.