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The story
A Yahoo! News article reporting that actress Haruka Ayase’s real surname is “Tademaru” (蓼丸) — a rare name held by only about 10 people nationwide — got picked up on 5ch’s Geinou Sports Breaking News+ board. The original article is the second installment of a series on the surprising real names of popular actors and actresses, featuring Ayase alongside several other celebrities.
The thread lit up with surprise over how to even read “Tademaru” and where it comes from, and the conversation spread as users brought up other celebrities’ unusual real names, like Satomi Ishihara and Ennosuke Ichikawa — though some also questioned the basis for the article’s claim that “only a dozen-ish people nationwide” share the name.
Wait, that’s their real name?! Actors with surprisingly unexpected real names (Part 2): who has a rare surname shared by only a dozen-ish people nationwide?
Among actors and actresses, while fans know them by their familiar stage names, some actually have rare surnames or surprising real names held by only a few dozen people nationwide.
Tracing how a name came to be, and the behind-the-scenes story of how a stage name was born, reveals glimpses of who someone really is and the path they’ve walked. This piece looks at the real names of five stars. Part 2.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
I'm so sick of seeing it already
[Reading] Tademaru
[Romanized] Tademaru
[National Rank] 91,278th
[Nationwide Count] Roughly 10 people
Found in small numbers in Hiroshima Prefecture. The "tade" element traces back to a word for structures built on open wilderness, derived from things tied to castle walls and moats. Linked to the Date clan. There's a Yamakage lineage of the (Fujiwara) clan name that traces back to Emperor Tenji bestowing it on Nakatomi no Kamatari.
Looked it up, it's not particularly cute
Anyway, sounds like she's not fading out of the business anytime soon
A foreign technical intern trainee? (joking that the name sounds non-Japanese)
What was the original reference again? Hikomaru?
Makes you wonder why she went with "Suzuki" of all things
Reina Triendl's mother's maiden name was "Nikumaru," but her parents never divorced or anything after she was born
so Reina herself just went by her Austrian father's surname, Triendl, like normal, until she got married
You'd basically need someone to tell you
Plenty of people wouldn't know how to read it
Could YOU read it on sight from the start?
Re: #1
Who actually verified this "only a dozen-ish people nationwide" claim anyway? This kind of made-up stat has run wild ever since surname-lookup sites got popular
The media can just lie freely now
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
Claims about how many people nationwide share a given surname tend to spread online without any cited source, and in this thread poster #74 raised exactly that doubt, asking “who actually checked this?” In reality, these rare-surname rankings are usually estimates compiled by surname-lookup websites from sources like phone directories or postal records — not results from an exhaustive survey like a national census. The topic of Haruka Ayase’s real name is also old ground that’s been rehashed many times among 5ch regulars, with some in the thread saying this must be the tenth time the thread’s been made — so part of the energy here came from nostalgia rather than novelty. The original article itself is the second installment of a series on the real names of popular actors and actresses, and besides Ayase it also cites examples like Satomi Ishihara and Ennosuke Ichikawa, with the gap between real names and stage names as the throughline.
※This article is a summarized excerpt based on the 5ch (Geinou Sports Breaking News+) thread “[Entertainment] Wait, that’s their real name?! Haruka Ayase has a rare surname shared by only a dozen-ish people nationwide.”
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