As much as I loke Rokugan, Old Japan & Samurai culture I'm totally ignorant of the Japanese Language. So, if I say idiocies, please correct me.

I remember an interesting thread about this on the old AEG forums on L5R, some (many?) years ago.

I would like to know if somebody has knowledge about this.

THE PROBLEM:

Not considering vassals, the Great Clan surnames are relatively few.

I know that maybe 99% of those bearing the name "Shiba" do not descend from Shiba himself but from some of his retainers who got the privilege of taking that surname.

Even so, in terms of naming conventions, there is no difference between a pure-blooded (possibly even a Kuge?) descendent of Shiba and the mass of other Shiba.

Shiba Takezo the pureblooded bears the same name of Shiba Takezo the low level bushi.

The great problem is that family names look more like Clan-Scale names than real family name: so there are certainly a lot of people who bear the same name in the same time and maybe most of them are not relatives at all!!!

If, to this, one add that many Vassals bear also the same name and sometimes can use the Patron name without saying the vassal name...IT IS A MESS!!!!!

Ho do we differentiate them?

DIVISIONS INSIDE THE MAIN FAMILIES

So, let's take example a numerous family like the Matsu and let's give them a common name like Hiroshi: how many Matsu Hiroshi will exist at the same time?

What differentiates Matsu Hiroshi born in Shiro Matsu from his cousin Matsu Hiroshi born in the Heigen Province or their distant relative Matsu Hiroshi born in the Imperial Capitol of Toshi Ranbo or from a not-related-at-all Matsu Hiroshi born in Kenson Gakka?

Only the Fortunes know how many Matsu Hiroshi exist at the same time and whether or not they are related!!

I remember that old AEG thread suggesting naming conventions adding a third part to the name, suggesting some defining detail.

Such details can be:

a) name of a sub-family or dynastic line

b) name of the place when one is born

c) adjectives (e.g. Matsu Hiroshi The Bold is different from Matsu Hiroshi the Feeble).

With adjectives it is easy but does anyone knows what is the convention for indicating specific birthplaces or sub-familiar/dynastic groups?

Please, help me!

DIVISIONS INSIDE THE VASSAL FAMILIES

The evidence on the matter is complicated and sometimes self-contradictory.

http://l5r.wikia.com/wiki/Vassal_family

Vassal Families are described either as either specific family lines or as vassal groups (Status 0.5 Ji-Samurai?).

Off course the two things are pretty different and they are not synonyms.

I feel that "vassal families" cannot be just dynastic lines (otherwise each clan should have 50 or 60 vassal families) but they must represent something special, with maybe further degrees of articulation inside them.

But let's check the sources: L5R rpg 4th ed. Core Rules p.95 define Vassal Families as Ji-Samurai (Status 0.5) but Emerald Empire p.71 seems to imply that such a status difference does not exist!

My own take on this (so nothing official) is that there are Vassal families and "VASSAL FAMILIES," according to how much they are far from the patron family in terms of blood.

So, Koritome Hiroshi (Ji-Samurai Status 0.5) is different from Matsu Hiroshi No Koritome (Samurai Status 1, specific dynastic line of the Koritome but with stronger links with the Matsu).

Thoughts?
Suggestions?

How do you handle all of this?

(and please, if you know of some naming rule in terms of Japanese language, please, teach me!).

Ok, a lot to unpack here. Let me take a stab at it.

First, the Samurai were very serious about their lineage and made sure people knew it. You might see them call out, "I'm Matsu Hiroshi, descendant of Matsu Kagome and Akodo Gorobe. I fought at the Battle of Kyuden Tonbo and defeated Togashi Kuma" in the middle of battle. They kept detailed records of their family tree.

In game (back in the CCG days) we assumed if it was Lion vs. Lion (or any mirror) only one of them was the true Matsu Hiroshi and the other an impostor (which happened often enough). The victor (obviously) was the TRUE Matsu Hiroshi.

I'll keep updating this as I can. I'm at work and I'm supposed to be doing, ya know, work.

I assume you're coming at this from the perspective of the RPG, since this wasn't really a problem in the CCG.

Yeah, the naming gets confusing when you have thousands of people with the same family name. There isn't a canon solution to this, so in my campaign I drastically decreased the size of the main families and created a slew of new vassal families. Vassal families wouldn't always be so specialized either.

2 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

Vassal Families are described either as either specific family lines or as vassal groups (Status 0.5 Ji-Samurai?).

They are both. Vassal families are their own families, but they also have their own holdings, making them vassals.

2 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

I feel that "vassal families" cannot be just dynastic lines (otherwise each clan should have 50 or 60 vassal families) but they must represent something special, with maybe further degrees of articulation inside them.

I've always treated the canon vassal families as just examples, not a comprehensive list. So there could easily be 50 or 60 vassal families in each clan. There certainly are in my campaign.

2 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

But let's check the sources: L5R rpg 4th ed. Core Rules p.95 define Vassal Families as Ji-Samurai (Status 0.5) but Emerald Empire p.71 seems to imply that such a status difference does not exist!

Yeah, the sources contradict each other on that. My own interpretation is that it depends on the vassal family. Important ones like the Koritome or Tsume would have full status, whereas a vassal family whose job is to guard some podunk village would be considered ji-samurai.

I'm fairly sure that this isn't supposed to be a deal at all. Most samurai live within a relatively small community, and has little reason to bother with a dude two provinces away who happens to have the same name. Nobody cares, because it should be really rare that the two same-named samurai get involved in the same business. If it still does (say, they are both drafted into the same squadron of a clan army), then I guess one of them will just take a temporal name. Organizations that may be in a position to deal with same-named samurai know the whole family tree (like the Imperial Bureaucracy's Division of Services), so they are probably not at a loss.

Also there are a lot of names in the japanese language.

We mostly go with the following:

- Some samurai communicate with their close ones using their pre-gempukku names

- Most of the samurai use their post-gempukku names + family name

- When in doubt, Chosen Name + Family Name + Name of the Parents + Name of the School you attended + Name of your Sensei + Name of your homeprovince give enough unique combinations for it to not be a problem.

I'm pretty sure I created the thread on the AEG forums that you're referring to.

Pretty much all the canonical stuff dealing with vassal families is, IMHO, terrible and should be ignored.

The historical Japanese solution to this issue was adopting a second last name. This was almost always derived from the place name of that particular family's central holding (if a samurai) or the neighborhood/street they lived on (if a noble). 99% of the samurai clans you've heard of (Tokugawa, Oda, Takeda, Uesugi, Date, etc.) trace their lineage to only four families: the Taira, Minamoto, Fujiwara, and Tachibana.

Also, most samurai adopted a nickname that was used almost exclusively. It was considered extremely rude to call someone by their actual first name unless you were on very intimate terms with them.

Yoritomo Reiu, if it was you, I kind of remember you giving examples or naming rules.

Can you post them (if you can find them still)?

I knew what you say about the historical samurai surnames, all being alternatives dericing from those four families...but I'm too ignorant about how to properly do it in Rokugan!!

So, taking my past example:

4 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

What differentiates Matsu Hiroshi born in Shiro Matsu from his cousin Matsu Hiroshi born in the Heigen Province or their distant relative Matsu Hiroshi born in the Imperial Capitol of Toshi Ranbo or from a not-related-at-all Matsu Hiroshi born in Kenson Gakka?

Is it OK to do stuff like this?

I know all this would sound stupid and wrong to a Japanese speaker, but I'm just trying to do something which can be roughly "rational".

So, when four different "Matsu Hiroshi" live in the same place they will use the following alternatives:

• Matsu Hiroshi born in the Heigen Province= "Heigen Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Heigen"
• Matsu Hiroshi born in Shiro Matsu = "Yama Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Yama" (I used "Yama" province, since Matsu Hiroshi Matsu Shiro sounds stupid).
• Matsu Hiroshi born in Kenson Gakka = "Kenson Gakka Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Kenson Gakka"
• Matsu Hiroshi born in the Kurai District of the Imperial Capitol of Toshi Ranbo = "Kurai Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Kenson Gakka"

Does it all make sense ?

If you speak Japanese (and I do not!)...I beg your pardon for offending the language in such a way!!

I think part of this shows a great difference between historic Japanese culture and historic European culture. In Europe, people had, and still tend to have, a second given (or middle) name. This middle name, combined with the huge number of family names, tends to differentiate people pretty well, as people are unlikely to have the exact same three names unless there's a direct lineage, in which case we differentiate by Sr., Jr., III, IV, etc.

In Japan, you would instead use different kanji with the same readings, and thereby differentiate between different people with the same name (in addition to title/rank, lineage, region, etc.)

Of course, when all the Rokugani names are translated and use the Roman alphabet, this method isn't as useful...

So, while we can't quite do the same with the Rokugani names, the equivalent here would be:

Donachie, Donaghy, Donnachie and Donnachaidh

all of which are pronounced the same way.

30 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

So, while we can't quite do the same with the Rokugani names, the equivalent here would be:

Donachie, Donaghy, Donnachie and Donnachaidh

all of which are pronounced the same way.

The multiple ways through which English speakers can pronounce Latin letters is always a marvel for us Italians !! We always read as we write!!

1 hour ago, LucaCherstich said:

The multiple ways through which English speakers can pronounce Latin letters is always a marvel for us Italians !! We always read as we write!!

We were doing quite fine until the Normans invaded us with extra vowels!

12 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

Yoritomo Reiu, if it was you, I kind of remember you giving examples or naming rules.

Can you post them (if you can find them still)?

I knew what you say about the historical samurai surnames, all being alternatives dericing from those four families...but I'm too ignorant about how to properly do it in Rokugan!!

So, taking my past example:

Is it OK to do stuff like this?

I know all this would sound stupid and wrong to a Japanese speaker, but I'm just trying to do something which can be roughly "rational".

So, when four different "Matsu Hiroshi" live in the same place they will use the following alternatives:

• Matsu Hiroshi born in the Heigen Province= "Heigen Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Heigen"
• Matsu Hiroshi born in Shiro Matsu = "Yama Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Yama" (I used "Yama" province, since Matsu Hiroshi Matsu Shiro sounds stupid).
• Matsu Hiroshi born in Kenson Gakka = "Kenson Gakka Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Kenson Gakka"
• Matsu Hiroshi born in the Kurai District of the Imperial Capitol of Toshi Ranbo = "Kurai Hiroshi" or "Matsu Hiroshi no Kenson Gakka"

Does it all make sense ?

If you speak Japanese (and I do not!)...I beg your pardon for offending the language in such a way!!

Yeah, I can do that. It'll take a little while, though.

Regarding your example of four "Matsu Hiroshi" living in the same place:

1. As I mentioned above, the most historical Japanese solution would be for the four men to not go by the name"Hiroshi". They'd use their tsūshō instead (a name to be used in public). These were chosen by an individual and could be pretty much anything they wanted, although names based on titles were popular.
2. Saying something like "Heigen no Matsu Hiroshi" would be perfectly fine, although it sounds more like a description than a name. Not that the word order is reversed from English (AEG did frequently use the incorrect order in their materials, but FFG seems to be trying to fix that).
3. "Kurai Hiroshi" would be fine, although I would like to clarify that it usually wouldn't be a person's birthplace that would be used. This kind of name change would be done on the family level, not the individual.

15 hours ago, LucaCherstich said:

The multiple ways through which English speakers can pronounce Latin letters is always a marvel for us Italians !! We always read as we write!!

To be fair, you should blame that one on the Irish. :-) (Depending on your dialect, the Irish verb "bhfaighidh" sounds exactly like one of two English words: "we" or "why." And no, I'm not making that up.)

As for names, we make much heavier use of vassal families in my campaign, much like Fumi does. It helps clear up name confusion and adds depth to the setting.

Okay, first of all-- divorce any thought about Japanese from this issue entirely. Because this was NEVER an issue in Japan.

Real, actual samurai from Japan were known to change their name entirely for the flimsiest of reasons-- yes, even their family name. Thus new family names popped up not infrequently. Moreover, it seems that very few Samurai family lines actually lasted more than 3 or 4 generations-- at least in prominence-- before being "wiped out" or having their members scattered and serving various other lords. In other words-- it really isn't an issue.

Now... as for in Rokugan. Part of the issue is just how the game was created. In the very early inception of the game, by all means you saw a few of the same families repeating on various characters in order to show their relationship to one another. Each one had about 4 names that would appear on various characters, but by no means was it absolutely made absolutely positively certain that no other family names existed among the particular clan. The 4 names were meant to be the more powerful, influential families of the clan, but by all means initially it seemed possible, even likely, that there could be dozens of names found among a particular clan. Moreover, the idea that the one of the clan families was the given name of the clan's founder was also surely an idea that came up AFTER the family names were already being used. It is very likely that they didn't come up with names for the Kami and then make those the clan family names rather than the other way around.

Unfortunately, later material printed made it seem ever more certain that the clans only had the 4-6 previously established family names, no more and no less-- and adding an additional family name to the clan, no matter how small and insignificant, was a major alteration. There weren't enough 'Tsuruichi' to have ever become a major defining part of the Mantis clan, for example. The entire Tsuruchi family would have made up maybe 1% of the clan and in a more realistic scenario, simply would have been submerged into the culture and vanished into it even if the family name lived on-- you never would have seen any cards carrying it.

This was then later countered at some point when the idea of "vassal families" came up-- likely due to someone having created a character card within a clan that had a name that wasn't one of the established names for the clan or.. maybe it was just something in the RPG in order to mechanically give a character a family bonus beyond the established families. Sadly, it couldn't really be implemented as anything other than shoddily as it had already been established that every single member of the given clan was known by only the 4-6 established names. Thus while more family names were introduced, they came with the caveat that they were never being used anyway. And since they still had to somehow fit the mold established by the major family they were linked to, a lot of them are not particularly interesting.

But, I am not sure any of that is what you were really particularly looking for. More the question of well... how do people get family names? And that is a big, illogical can of worms.

Apparently whenever someone is given a new family name, all of their retainers also gain that name and they can adopt a bunch of ronin in order to expand it. Naturally, of course, this is incredibly bizarre given that no part of how Rokugan works explains any method through which a samurai is ever going to get retainers and where all these millions of ronin are coming from who always seem to be waiting in the wings to expand a family to being hundreds large with its own fully established unique battle school in less than a single generation. It really does not work out on paper no matter how you try to approach it unless certain aspects of how the RPG works and how the society is presented are flat out incorrect.

Now, as far as people being able to trace their family line back. Well... that is also highly problematic.

You see, a person has 2 parents, 4 grand parents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents and so forth. Rokugan has been around for about... 38-40 generations or so? Going back that far one has 274,877,906,944 to 1,099,511,627,776 ancestors from the time the kami were around, clearly more humans than there were at the time (that is more humans than have ever lived on earth in modern times!!)-- with considerably reduction each time one's family tree twists back onto itself. Secondly, for samurai-- any heroic actions tend to result in the death of the individual... or at least are part of a way of life that means one doesn't pass on their genes. As such, a lot of the individuals that people claim as "ancestors" are not those they are directly descended from.

It seems pretty impossible that anyone in the clan could be absolutely 100% certain that they could trace their ancestry back to a particular kami... well, maybe unless there was a direct line of first borns that always held special position and title for each successive generation since that time. But just as those numbers about how many ancestors one could have seem absolutely ludicrous-- it works the other way too. If each generation of a kami line had 3 children, the result would be that every Kami would have more descendants than grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. Genghis Khan lived about 800 years ago and 0.5% of all humans on the planet earth are descended from him. Given that in terms of Rokugan were are talking about a singular isolationist society and particularly about a relatively small social class within that society that breeds exclusively with others in that pool...

It is quite possible that there are individuals running around who are pretty unremarkable but in fact are descended from every single kami who passed on their genes, but they have no idea.

Given all this, it seems quite likely that individuals simply claim everyone in the past who carried the same family name as their "ancestor" and probably take special care to remind themselves of any remarkable figures in the past 4 generations... but just like people living now a days, past 4 generations they likely haven't any clue regardless of how careful the Otomo and Ikoma claim they are about keeping records.

yes.

I have Always found so odd that the same family names were kept for more than a thousand years. And the same is true for a lot of other things (customs, material culture, etc...) no isolationist culture on Earth ever remained so static for so long.

Even so, I'm trying to make sense of Rokugan.

So I'll do two things:

1) augment the number of vassal families. I already did it but feel the urge if really expand the idea. It is irrational that a whole legion of Matsu Samurai bear the Matsu surmame. There are clearly hundreds of minor vassal families of Ji-samurai whose existence is not reported at all. Most of them will be status 0.5 and the names will be created ad-hoc. They can use the family trait of their patron clan or use something ad-hoc created for the single samurai.

2) consider the esistence of multiple lines: the Heigen Matsu are not the same as the Yama Matsu.

There is something, from the RPG angle that is missing from this discussion.

Yes, each Great Clan has 4-6 main Families, but there are noted to be more Vassal families to each of them. Some of those Vassal families rise in prominence because of a specific niche or service they provide, and therefore either give a unique stat bonus, or have a small Dojo with a specific Path that they teach. And those families are considered to be Samurai with Status 1.0. Other vassal families are ji-Samurai, and have Status 0.5.

But one of the things the RPG stresses, is that no matter your family name as a vassal family, if you meet Samurai from other clans, you present yourself as a member of one of the main families, to which your own family owes its vassalage.

For example, four Samurai from the Lion Clan meet, all named Karai.
One is Akodo Karai. the other is Damasu Karai, the third is Ichime Karai, and the 4th is Itagawa Karai. But if the four of them will meet a Shiba Bushi, they will eahc present themselves as Akodo Karai (with the possibility of the vassal families members presneting their vassal family name as a second name, to avoid confusion.)

That is my take on this, and how i'd play it in my game.

You are right but I feel that multiple approaches can be applied to the matter in order to represent the complicated situation.

Another issue is that the same source you use but do not seem to quote (Emerald Empire 4th Edition?) seems also to imply that most samurai from vassal and patron families have similar status, contradicting the core rules which speak about vassal families as ji-samurai (half samurai?) with 0.5 status.

Is socially acceptable that a ji-samurai uses the surname of his patrons?

Not so sure about that.

Maybe it is more appropriate to use some expression saying "vassal of..." or "retainer of...". But not speaking Japanese, I do not know which expression to use.

Furthermore we do not even know which vassal families are Ji-samurai (status 0.5) and which are not (Status 1.0). This certainly adds a further level of confusion.