I'm having a lot of trouble with this pair. What do you use to distinguish between the two? In particular, I come up with 氏 from "surname" all the time.

i think that the:

"when a woman gets married, she changes her surname" story did it for me.

It's really all about the strength of your stories tbh. If you get them confused, look at them both and modify them so that they are completely different. shouldn't have much of a problem then.

Surname -> HERname -> includes 女

Aha! Just the kind of stupid pun I was looking for! If it worked for "chestnut"...

Thanks!

Oh god, did you come up with "westnut" tree too?

I think the original "west nut tree" idea can be attributed to inuki, but it was synewave's comments that got me started with the puns to differentiate similar keywords. Now, it seems, the more I groan at the pun the better I remember the character!

You can remember Surname (1557) by thinking of the status of women; ie low. Further more think of peasants. The Family Name (1828) is used for formal occasions. Consequently you see the latter on government documents, application forms and the like. Also, before the Japanese began to use surnames as we in the west understand them few people had surnames. Only the then head of family or clan was entitled to use the Family Name.

My own wife's family name is Aoteki　青手木, (a rather unusual name rare even in and around 蒲生町 (Kamou) in 鹿児島 (Kagoshima), her home town) and she can remember her father being the only person ever called that by neighbours. The rest of the family were always referred to by reference to his status or by their given name.

[Katsuo]

To me 氏 looks a bit like a capital "F" combined with a lower case "t".

Ft = Family title = Family name.