Do candidates garner more votes simply because their names are better recognized? To answer this question, we use elections to the Japanese House of Councillors as a natural experiment. Members are elected in national and local-level districts. To isolate the effect of name recognition on vote choice, we compare the vote shares of national district candidates in high-name-recognition prefectures-which we define as prefectures in which a national candidate shares the same surname as a local district candidate-and the other low-name-recognition prefectures. Our research design addresses internal and external validity problems from which previous studies suffer. We find that national candidates obtain 69% larger vote shares in high-as opposed to low-name-recognition prefectures. This result holds when controlling for idiosyncratic characteristics of national candidates and prefecture-specific surname popularity.