I might be exaggerating a bit here but I believe upwards of 99.9% of Japanese last names are some combination of the following characters:

山(yama, mountain)  藤(fuji or to, wisteria)  本(moto, base)  野(no, field)  田(ta or da, paddy)  木(ki, tree)  中(naka, middle)  井(i, well)  川(kawa or gawa, river)  and 佐(sa, help).

All the classics, such as 山本(Yamamoto), 田中(Tanaka) and 佐藤(Sato) use these characters exclusively.  There are a few oddballs like Suzuki (鈴木, bell-tree) that refuse to conform, but by and large, they’re some description of unfortunately nearly ubiquitous geographical features.  Lord knows there were plenty of middles of fields lying around for people to name their families after around 1870, when common folks first got last names.  There aren’t many occupational last names, and those that do exist are famous families of craftsmen, kind of like being named “Baretta”.

What tends to be more interesting is given names.  The well-known Yokos and Taros are a bit antiquated – not so many girls are being named -ko anymore, which is just fine with me, since the character for that, 子 means “child”, making it not exactly a 21st century raised-consciousness type of name.  Any male name with the character 郎 (ro, boy) sounds like the equivalent of “John” to me, either deliberately traditional or just lazy.  Males of my generation seem to have a lot of 4-syllable, 2-character names like Yukinobu or Hirofumi.  Kind of self-important-sounding but it’s not like they chose it.

Kids less than 6 years old have names seeming to comprise any random 2 syllables the dart happened to strike.  I suppose this represents a growing dissatisfaction with the limits of traditionalism, but in my mind no amount of throwing off the chains of a culture past its time is worth being named Raku or Era.  I’ve actually heard tales of kids being named “Komugi” and “Kokoa”, which mean “wheat” and “cocoa” (pronounced coco-ah) respectively, or maybe unselfrespectively.  It all comes back to my feelings on katakana in general – either find a way to say it with dignity within one language, or switch languages.  Stop trying to escape Japanese via uglier Japanese.