Shinto girls’ names
Names connected with Shinto practice and the Japanese kami.
Shinto shapes Japanese girls' naming less through a stock of religious names than through what is considered worth naming a child after.
The kami are not a fixed pantheon so much as the presences understood to inhabit mountains, rivers, trees, the sea and the weather. Naming a daughter for snow, for a season, for a flower or for light is not decorative in that context — it is continuous with a view of the world in which those things are not inert.
Amaterasu, the sun goddess, is the most prominent single figure, and the imperial line was traditionally held to descend from her. Sun and light elements in girls' naming carry that association, as noted on the Atlas sun page.
Japanese naming also works differently at a mechanical level. A name is written in kanji, and the same sound can be written several ways with quite different meanings, so two girls called Yuki may be carrying snow and happiness respectively. The choice of characters is as much the name as the sound is — which is why any translation of a Japanese name into English is necessarily partial, and why this library records the characters where it can.