Kawabata
surname · Latin script
Meaning, in Japanese: ‘side or bank of the river’; written two ways, with two different characters for kawa ‘river’
Recorded as a male name· opposite-gender records fall within measured source noise
/kɑwəbɑtə/(machine-generated) pronunciation, model-generated
Kawabata is a surname written in the Latin script, most frequently recorded in Japan.
- JPJapan
- BRBrazil
- USUnited States
Where the name is found, darker where our sources hold more of it. No national register counts its bearers anywhere we hold data, so the map carries no figures. One hue, darker where it is more common; hover a country for its figure.
Meaning & origin(measured from records)
‘side or bank of the river’; written two ways, with two different characters for kawa ‘river’. One family is descended from the northern Fujiwara through the Saionji family; the other from the Sasaki family. The name is also found in Okinawa Island.
Sources 1
- Dictionary of American Family Names
Attested across 3 languages in the etymology graph.
How Kawabata is read(measured from records)
Kawabata is one spelling over 3 language communities, and the dictionaries record it differently in 2 of them. Each row is what a source recorded for that language, beside the share of this name’s records the language holds. No single row is the name’s meaning.
- Japanese70%
‘side or bank of the river’; written two ways, with two different characters for kawa ‘river’. One family is descended from the northern Fujiwara through the Saionji family; the other from the Sasaki family. The name is also found in Okinawa Island.
as a nameDictionary of American Family Names
- English18%
Yasunari, Japanese author (Nobel
as a namePronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
- Portuguese6.4%
No dictionary in our sources glosses Kawabata in Portuguese.
The share is ours — how much of this name’s records each language holds. The sense beside it is the source’s, quoted and credited, including where it names a gender. We do not publish a gender of our own per language: our records carry one figure for the spelling as a whole.
Where in the world(measured from records)
Recorded in:
No national register we accept counts this name’s bearers, so the page lists where it is found and publishes no figure.
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)
- Kawabata Sanefumib. 1845JPJapanese kugyō
- Sanehide Kawabatab. 1888JPhistorian
- Yasunari Kawabatab. 1899JPJapanese novelist (1899–1972)
- Kaori Kawabatab. 1933JPJapanese literary scholar and translator (1933–2021)
- Junshirō Kawabatab. 1934JPJapanese theologian
- Hiroshi Kawabatab. 1944JPJapanese jurist
- Tatsuo Kawabatab. 1945JPJapanese politician
- Hiroto Kawabatab. 1964JPJapanese novelist
- Emi Kawabatab. 1970JPJapanese alpine skier
- Shingo Kawabatab. 1987JPJapanese former professional baseball 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 19 sources across 11 countries.
| Country | Register | Year | Count | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EE Estonia | Siseministeerium — population register name list 2023 | 2023 | — | — |
Reference works 4
- Dictionary of American Family Names
- Nederlandse FamilienamenBank (Dutch surname bank; ex-Meertens Instituut, now CBG)2007
- 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
- What does the name Kawabata mean, and where does it come from?
- ‘side or bank of the river’; written two ways, with two different characters for kawa ‘river’. Recorded by Dictionary of American Family Names.
- How do you pronounce Kawabata?
- A machine transcription gives /kɑwəbɑtə/ (IPA) for Japanese.
- In which country does Kawabata have the most bearers?
- Kawabata is most frequently recorded in Japan.
What do you want to know about Kawabata?
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/kawabataThe 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, “Kawabata”. Data snapshot 2026-10-10.