Family name origins & meanings
- Japanese : ‘above the river’; found throughout Japan and the Ryūkyū Islands. Two families from villages of that name, in Iwami (now part of Shimane prefecture) and Shimotsuke (now Tochigi prefecture), descend from the Sasaki and northern Fujiwara respectively. Another samurai family is of Satsuma (now Kagoshima prefecture). The characters are sometimes pronounced Kawanoe or Kawaue. A less usual rendering is with characters meaning ‘river deity’. Listed in the Shinsen shōjiroku.