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Amaya is a Japanese surname, and it's almost unknown for a surname to be used as a given name in Japan. The Japanese Girls' Name dictionary (http://japanese.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.dd.iij4u.or.jp/%7Eume20/f%5Fname/) does include two kanji spellings of Amaya (one of those is phonetic characters, and the other is "rain" + "night"), but Amaya is most definitely not a traditional first name in Japan. As it's axiomatic that any Japanese first name that can be written differently, will be written differently, one can conclude from the fact that only two kanji spellings of Amaya are listed in this huge dictionary that it's exceedingly rare.

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BTW, the surname Amaya is usually "heaven" + "valley."

This message was edited 2/17/2008, 8:33 PM