Japanese clans

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This is a list of Japanese clans. The old clans (gōzoku) mentioned in the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki lost their political power before the Heian period, during which new aristocracies and families, kuge, emerged in their place. After the Heian period, the samurai warrior clans gradually increased in importance and power until they came to dominate the country after the founding of the first shogunate.

Japan traditionally practiced cognatic primogeniture, or male-line inheritance in regard to passing down titles and estates. By allowing adult adoption, or for men to take their wife's name and be adopted into her family served as a means to pass down an estate to a family without any sons, Japan has managed to retain continuous family leadership for many of the below clans, the royal family, and even ordinary family businesses.^[1][2]

The ability for Japanese families to track their lineage over successive generations plays a far more important role than simply having the same name as another family, as many commoners did not use a family name prior to the Meiji Restoration, and many simply adopted (名字, myōji) the name of the lord of their village, or the name of their domain, and may not necessarily have been a retainer to the clan. Other clan names are based on common geographic features or other arbitrary words that having didn't necessarily indicate clan membership.^[3]

Many families also adopted sons from other families or married their daughters into other families to cement ties with a larger kin group outside of those with the same name as the main family line, called keibatsu (閨閥, lit. bedroom clique), a clan or family relationship built around both blood and maternal relations. Tokugawa Ieyasu himself had adopted two dozen children of allies in addition to his 16 acknowledged children.^[4]

The Meiji Restoration sought dismantle the clan structure, giving clan leaders titles of nobility to inspire loyalty to the emperor rather than individual clans. However those familial relationships built over multiple generations still maintained their ties, first as monbatsu, then with industrialization, evolved into the pre-war zaibatsu, which were formed by these same inter-clan relationships. With the abolishment of the kazoku in 1947, they reverted to their unofficial keibatsu, and elements of which can be seen today in political families such as the Satō–Kishi–Abe family, with family ties to Marquess Inoue Kaoru, Viscount Ōshima Yoshimasa, and pre-war Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, all descendants of lower ranking Chōshū samurai families who benefited from the clan's outsized influence in the Meiji era government, and effectively created their own new clan, despite the lack of official title.^[1][5][6]