IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v278y2000i1p282-288.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Power-law distribution of family names in Japanese societies

Author

Listed:
  • Miyazima, Sasuke
  • Lee, Youngki
  • Nagamine, Tomomasa
  • Miyajima, Hiroaki

Abstract

We study the frequency distribution of family names. From a common data base, we count the number of people who share the same family name. This is the size of the family. We find that (i) the total number of different family names in a society scales as a power law of the population, (ii) the total number of family names of the same size decreases as the size increases with a power law and (iii) the relation between size and rank of a family name also shows a power law. These scaling properties are found to be consistent for five different regional communities in Japan.

Suggested Citation

  • Miyazima, Sasuke & Lee, Youngki & Nagamine, Tomomasa & Miyajima, Hiroaki, 2000. "Power-law distribution of family names in Japanese societies," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 278(1), pages 282-288.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:278:y:2000:i:1:p:282-288
    DOI: 10.1016/S0378-4371(99)00546-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437199005464
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/S0378-4371(99)00546-4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Beare, Brendan K & Toda, Alexis Akira, 2020. "On the emergence of a power law in the distribution of COVID-19 cases," University of California at San Diego, Economics Working Paper Series qt9k5027d0, Department of Economics, UC San Diego.
    2. Ferreira, G.D. & Viswanathan, G.M. & da Silva, L.R. & Herrmann, H.J., 2018. "Surname complex network for Brazil and Portugal," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 499(C), pages 198-207.
    3. Asif, Muhammad & Hussain, Zawar & Asghar, Zahid & Hussain, Muhammad Irfan & Raftab, Mariya & Shah, Said Farooq & Khan, Akbar Ali, 2021. "A statistical evidence of power law distribution in the upper tail of world billionaires’ data 2010–20," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 581(C).
    4. Concas, Giulio & Marchesi, Michele & Pinna, Sandro & Serra, Nicola, 2006. "On the suitability of Yule process to stochastically model some properties of object-oriented systems," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 370(2), pages 817-831.
    5. Zhang, Jiang & Yu, Tongkui, 2010. "Allometric scaling of countries," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(21), pages 4887-4896.
    6. De Luca, Andrea & Rossi, Paolo, 2009. "Renormalization group evaluation of exponents in family name distributions," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 388(17), pages 3609-3614.
    7. Wang, Jian & Song, Weiguo & Zheng, Hongyang & Telesca, Luciano, 2010. "Temporal scaling behavior of human-caused fires and their connection to relative humidity of the atmosphere," Ecological Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 221(1), pages 85-89.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:278:y:2000:i:1:p:282-288. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.