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Updated June 9, 2019

Family name origins & meanings

  • Japanese : ‘(one who lives) near the base of the stone’; common in west-central Japan and the Ryūkyū Islands. One family is named after Iwamoto-mura in Suruga (now part of Shizuoka prefecture); another descends from Minamoto no Yoshimitsu (1056–1127), an ancestor of several samurai families; still another family is of northern Fujiwara descent.

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