Last Names

Since arriving at my school and seeing my list of students, as well as co-workers' names, I have noticed a large number of names I have never seen before, as well as a lack of names I have seen very often. I am yet to see a Tanaka, Matsumoto, Yamada, Takahashi, Kuwahara, Ito, Ono, Fukushima, or Kimura, as well as many other common names. In addition, there are many names I have never seen or heard of before, like Yanagisawa, Nagawatari, Ego, Ogihara, Uchibori, Horiuchi, Aruga, Kirikubo, and the best of all, Yoda. The dramatic difference in names is probably related to location more than anything. From what I've heard, back in the day a lot of people chose last names based on where they lived or what they did for a living. Seeing as the terrain out here is a little different than that of Tokyo, Osaka, etc., it's not that surprising that names are little different. The process or tendencies in making names was probably different too, since they were separated by a fair amount of distance. I have seen a lot of names out here with "sawa" which means stream, as well as "hori" or "bori" which means to dig. I am sure there has been plenty of linguistic research on where names come from and evolve, but I'm not so interested in that I'd actually go looking for any of it. Of course people move around or change last names all the time, so I'm sure it's somewhat hard to keep track of who comes from where. It's not a big deal or anything, I just find it interesting.