Kitagawa
surname · Latin script
Meaning: ‘northern river’; found mostly in western Japan and Okinawa Island
Recorded for both men and women· direction only, no split published
Kitagawa is a surname written in the Latin script, with more bearers in the United States than in any other country.
- USUnited States1 in 483K(measured from records)
- BRBrazil1 in 484K
- CHSwitzerland1 in 646K
carrying the name, as counted by each country's national register. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
- United States (measured from records)
- Sources
- 73 (measured from records)
- 1 in 483K (inferred from the name graph)
689 people, 2010
Highest-authority source
United States
measured from records inferred from the name graph
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘northern river’; found mostly in western Japan and Okinawa Island.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 4 languages in the etymology graph.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Kitagawa 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 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | 689 | 1 in 483K | 693 | Kitagawa | 73 |
| BR Brazil | 437 | 1 in 484K | 437 | Kitagawa | 51 |
| AR Argentina | 22 | 1 in 2.1M | 22 | Kitagawa | 13 |
| CH Switzerland | 13 | 1 in 646K | 13 | — | 1 |
| PL Poland | 5 | 1 in 7.7M | 3 | — | — |
689 people counted by Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010, 2010. 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: IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname); Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010; Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020; RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national); BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames); dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames). 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)
- Utamarob. 1753JPnot in their usual name175?-1806 Japanese artist
- Joseph Kitagawab. 1915JPJapanese theologian (1915-1992)
- Teruo Ishiib. 1924JPnot in their usual nameJapanese Film director, Theatre director and author (1924–2005)
- Johnny Kitagawab. 1931JPJapanese businessman and talent manager (1931–2019)
- 北川進b. 1951JPnot in their usual nameJapanese chemist
- Kazuo Kitagawab. 1953JPJapanese politician
- Tsutomu Kitagawab. 1957JPJapanese actor
- Miyuki Kitagawab. 1967JPJapanese manga artist
- Eri Kitagawab. 1975JPJapanese actor and seiyū
- Keiko Kitagawab. 1986JPJapanese actress
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).
Evidence(measured from records)
Attested in 13 sources across 7 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2020 | 2020 | 693 | #35,059 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2000 | 2000 | 690 | #31,658 |
| US United States | Census Bureau — Surname Frequency 2010 | 2010 | 689 | #33,196 |
| BR Brazil | IBGE — Censo 2022 Nomes no Brasil per-token lookup (v3 API, given+surname) | — | 437 | #19,186 |
| AR Argentina | RENAPER — Apellidos (person counts, national) | — | 22 | — |
| CH Switzerland | BFS — Familiennamen der Wohnbevölkerung (surnames) | 2024 | 13 | #50,156 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 3 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 3 | #267,560 |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (surnames) | 2026 | 2 | — |
| PL Poland | dane.gov.pl — PESEL living persons (names) | — | 2 | #345,964 |
| US United States | wru Name Dictionary — US surnames, Census 2010 subset (Khanna et al.) | — | — | — |
Reference works 2
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Wikipedia surname tokens
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
- What does the name Kitagawa mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘northern river’; found mostly in western Japan and Okinawa Island. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- In which country does Kitagawa have the most bearers?
- In the United States, the national register counted about 689 people named Kitagawa, more than in any other country we hold, where it is most often spelled kitagawa.
- Where is Kitagawa most common?
- Kitagawa is densest in the United States, where the national register counts about 1 in 483 thousand people carrying it.
- How common is the name Kitagawa?
- In the United States, the national register counted 689 people named Kitagawa in 2010, about 1 in 483 thousand residents.
What do you want to know about Kitagawa?
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/kitagawaThe 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, “Kitagawa”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.