Joke's on you! Humans will be extinct by 2531. Maybe by 2031 if Trump becomes president again.

https://xkcd.com/605

The assumptions are almost certainly going to turn out to be incorrect, but even if everyone ends up with the name Sato, people will just start adding other names to differentiate, like they've done in cultures throughout history.

Given their birth rate they'd be lucky to have even Sato's around by the 26th century.

“If everyone becomes Sato, we may have to be addressed by our first names or by numbers,” he said, according to the Mainichi. “I don’t think that would be a good world to live in.”

What's wrong with names?

Check out Vietnam, almost everyone here is Nguyen, 30-39% to be precise

Very optimistic to believe that the human race is gonna survive that long.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Japanese citizens will all have the same family name in 500 years’ time unless married couples are permitted to use separate surnames, a new study has suggested as part of a campaign to update a civil code dating back to the late 1800s.

Yoshida conceded that his projections were based on several assumptions, but said the idea was to use numbers to explain the present system’s potential effects on Japanese society to draw attention to the issue.

Some social media users wrongly assumed the study, first reported on Monday but published in March, was an April fools’ day prank, but Yoshida said he wanted it to give people pause for thought.

A nation of Satos “will not only be inconvenient but also undermine individual dignity,” he said, according to the Asahi Shimbun, adding that the trend would also lead to the loss of family and regional heritage.

The study contained an alternative scenario extrapolated from a 2022 survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, in which 39.3% of 1,000 employees aged 20 to 59 said they wanted to share a surname even if they had the option of using separate ones.

Conservative members of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) say changing the law would “undermine” family unity and cause confusion among children.

The original article contains 527 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 60%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Making sure you’re not dating a cousin would be a lot more work.

This assumes that they only ever have the names they have now. Call me crazy, but I suspect that immigration policies will probably shift a little at some point in the next 500 years.

Hell, I wouldn't even be willing to bet that any given country would still be around in it's current form by then, including Japan.

I fail to see how spouses having the same name has any impact on the distribution in the future, the factor that controls that is the names of the children. To fix this you'd need to do something along the lines of girls get the dad's surname, boys the mother's, or the other way around. Also Spanish customs are worth looking at.

Interesting. I married a Japanese woman, and when she registered me in Japan she changed my surname to hers, lol.

We don't live there, though.

everyone should be called seto after red xiii's dad instead

I'm pretty sure Japan has bigger problems that will come up much sooner just like the rest of us.