Yes, I have an example. I actually have multiple examples in mind, but I know that I’d better have an example readily to hand before I write a post here. 
This isn’t a character set issue, in case you’re wondering: I’ve seen it done by the French as well, so it also can’t be about disambiguating family name from personal name, as the Francophone and the Anglophone worlds have the same first-name last-name convention.
It’s supposed to be pronounced REALLY LOUD.
It’s just a stylistic preference, I suppose. I’ve seen French people do it as well, for example when writing an address on an envelope.
It is for diambiguation. The English speaking world doesn’t have a completely consistent way of representing names - hence people with first names that sound like last names and vice versa can’t rely on other people using the ordering of names to sort it out. The French have the same problem.
People moving to new countries where the can rely neither on the names themselves or the ordering to make things clear use capitalisation to disambiguate.
In the particular case cited by the OP, “Akioshi KITAOKA”, that person is Japanese, and in Japanese their name would be written as “Kitaoka Akiyoshi”, with the surname first. When you write Japanese names in English, sometimes the Japanese order is used, and sometimes the English order, so it does disambiguate to put the surname in capital letters.
I always thought it was because different languages vary in name order, what is considered a family name, etc.
This was standard practice in Cameroon, where a given person may have one name or eight names which may or may not be in the expected order. I’ve assumed it is a generally French practice, but the French have a pretty long multi-cultural history.
In geneaogical write-ups, it’s also quite common for surnames to be capitalized. I believe the purpose is to facilitate scanning a long list of names with capsule biographies fpr the one(s) you’re particularly interested in, plus the occasional disambiguation from surnames used as given names.
It doesn’t disambiguate anything unless you know the convention already though. If I saw half of the name capitalized I would assume the person would capitalize their own first name. Why would you capitalize your last name?
Like even sven I mostly associate this practice with Africans, but it is used around the world. The television footage from the Beijing Olympic Games used this convention: if an athlete’s name appeared on screen, it was in the order common to their language, with the last name capitalized for disambiguation. Except Hungarians who had their names rendered in the Western order. I was specifically looking for them to see if the broadcasting people had got it right.
It is a pretty simple convention, and is in my experience used pretty consistently in much of the world to indicate the surname.( However, I have seen it most commonly in Francophone Africa, since the position of the surname varies so much even within countries).
It makes more sense to capitalize the surname, because first of all in most systems people have only one primary surname (recognizing that some systems such as Spanish use a secondary surname); and because the surname is normally more important for identification (since usually surnames are more distinctive than given names).
What is your rationale for capitalizing a first name?
The terms “last name” and “first name” are problematic. For Chinese, Hungarians, Japanese and Koreans (and probably for others as well), the first name is the family name or surname. However, when you talk about a “first name” in English, there’s an assumption that you are talking about a given name.
Yes, you have to know the convention that the family name is capitalised. Why the family name and not the given name? I suspect that it’s because when you have a list of personal names, you arrange by the family name regardless of whether it’s the first, middle or last name. (And for people without a family name, you have to use another rule, usually to arrange by the first name.)
Yes, in my post above when I said “last name”, I meant “family name”. But then again many cultures do not use family names.
It can also be an issue with people with last names that include spaces, to indicate what constitutes the last name.
e.g.
Milhouse VAN HOUTEN (first name Milhouse, last name Van Houten).
Milhouse Van HOUTEN (last name Houten)
This may have been historically true, but in modern times most nations have imposed the use of family names, in particular for the purpose of easier identification. (Exceptions may include places like Indonesia and Afghanistan, where many people still use a single name, and Iceland, where your surname is based on your father’s given,)
I am an English speaker. I put his name that way because a) he did it first, and b) to keep myself from forgetting which was the surname. Even so I almost got it wrong, although it seems forehead-slappingly obvious now.
Let’s say ODA Nobunaga gets his first mention, and some English or more likely Dutch/Portuguese translator assumes that the first, shorter name is the given name, and so starts referring to him as Senhor Nobunaga. Later people start either switching the order or making assumptions, and then where are you left when you try to figure out what to call him.
No, it doesn’t explain why some Europeans do this (Hungarians are excepted as they put surname first).
At the desk across the aisle from mine works a Cameroonian man who I understand has a single name. When he moved here to study, he had to declare a “first” and “last” name, so he just doubled his name. He’s also chosen another first name which is more familiar to French speakers and which he informally uses around here. I think even sven can testify that many Cameroonians do indeed have a single name.
Also, I understand that many Arabic cultures use patronymics; Arabs can in fact have a string of names representing their father, grandfather, and so on. Is that still accurate?
I actually wish this convention was more commonly used in Spanish-speaking countries. (I have seen it, but not nearly as commonly as in francophone Africa.)
Traditionally, Spanish names are in the format [given name] [father’s surname] [mother’s surname]. Married women append their husband’s name with “de.” That’s fine as long as everyone does that. However, people aren’t very consistent about it. Some people give their names as [first given name] [second given name] [father’s surname]. And while it’s usually easy to tell a traditional Spanish given name from a surname, this is not always the case; and it can be very confusing with those descended from immigrants with English, Chinese, Middle Eastern, or other surnames or given names. I fairly frequently have trouble figuring out what someone’s surname is if it is just written out.
Yup. Where I lived, people were just starting to pick up last names, but they weren’t really being passed down much. So I knew people with names like Souley Mota (he had a motorcycle), Kiza Hamidou (Hamidou’s daughter Kiza, as opposed to Kiza Alim who is Alim’s sister) and Bouba Appareil (whose eyes bugged out like a camera.) Sometimes you’d hear some really funny ones- a guy once introduced himself as Ali name of the bus company he works for. Kind of like a Greyhound employee calling himself “Bob Greyhound Bus Lines.”
You may have a local name, a traditional birth-order name, a French name, a Muslim name, a nickname given by your parents, a name your father has given you, a name picked given by your friends on your marriage day, a name picked up from your children (Mother of Amadou) and any number of other names. Or you might not. There really wasn’t a single naming convention. In a place with 200+ languages and ethnicities, you are going to find a lot of diversity.
I had a good friend who worked for the embassy who only had a single name. His business required he travel to the US occasionally, and he had the hardest time getting his papers in line. I think eventually he just made up a last name, but he wasn’t happy about it. Why would you want some random name that isn’t yours? He couldn’t figure out why America wouldn’t accept his name.
A funny story- I knew a married American volunteer couple that suddenly found their progress in the village was halting. Previously friendly people started giving them the cold shoulder, and their work partners started making things complicated. Eventually it came out that people were upset because they were tricking them. They weren’t husband and wife, you see. They had the same last name- so surely they were brother and sister!
Fascinating! It’s always interesting to observe a consequential social change up close.
I guess he’s married to his job.
In the novel “Jennifer Government,” everyone’s last name is their employer. The title character works for the gubmint, while people who work two jobs would hyphenate. Unemployed bums get only one name.