Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 19:00, 15 July 2005

To write and edit Japan-related articles, please follow these conventions. See:

• Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style for the general case;
• Misplaced Pages:Japanese translation note for appropriate translation terms.

English words of Japanese origin

The en:Misplaced Pages is an English language encyclopedia. An English loan word or place name with a Japanese origin should be used in its most commonly used English form in the body of an article, even if it is pronounced or spelled differently from the properly romanized Japanese: use Mount Fuji, Tokyo, jujutsu, shogi, instead of Fujisan, Tōkyō, jūjutsu, shōgi. Give the romanized Japanese form in the opening paragraph if it differs from the English form (see below).

There are some Japanese loan words that are usually pluralized according to English usage (although this usage may sound odd to native Japanese speakers), such as tsunami, tycoon, and futon (which take the plurals tsunamis, tycoons, and futons). For more specialized Japanese words where English-language speakers are often familiar with Japanese word usage, such as koi, sushi, haiku, anime, ronin, or dojo, the word is usually the same for both singular and plural forms. For a few words, such as geisha and kamikaze, you can often find either form of pluralization used. When in doubt, it is probably best to check with a dictionary as a resource (for example, the Merriam Webster website for American English-usage).

See Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (use English).

Romanization

Misplaced Pages uses the Hepburn romanization. This is because it gives the best indication of Japanese pronunciation to the intended audience of English speakers. People who care about other romanization systems are knowledgeable enough to look after themselves.

Take care with these points:

1. Long o and u are written with macrons as ō ū respectively.
   (If you are having difficulty typing these characters with your IME, remember that you can now also click on the special characters below the Misplaced Pages edit box. You can also enter the HTML entity ō for ō, and ū for ū.)
2. は, ヘ and を as particles are written wa, e, and o respectively.
3. Syllabic n ん is generally written n (see below).
4. Syllabic n ん is written n' when followed by a vowel or y but not when followed by another n.

However, article titles must use short vowels and omit apostrophes after syllabic n since macrons are difficult to enter and proper use of apostrophes cannot be expected from people not familiar with Japanese.

The original version of Hepburn used m when syllabic n ん is followed by b, m, or p. While generally deprecated, this is still allowed in titles for cases where the official romanization continues to use m (examples: Asahi Shimbun, Namba Station). Use Google to check popularity if in doubt, and create a redirect from n version.

Japanese terms

Give the romanization for any name or term written in kanji or kana when the Japanese pronunciation is different from the English pronunciation. Use the pattern:

English (Kanji rōmaji)

Then you can use the English term in the rest of the article.

For example:

At 3,776 meters (12,388 feet) tall, Mount Fuji (富士山 Fuji-san) is the highest mountain on the island of Honshu …

Person names

For naming the title of an article about a historical figure, use the traditional Japanese order

• family name + given name, for example Tokugawa Ieyasu.

(The general consensus is that people born before the first year of Meiji (1868) are considered historical figures.)

For the title for modern figures, there is not yet an agreement on the name order. In general, use the form of a person's name that is most widely known and used by English speakers. If a person is not known well, the best thing you can do is to ask other contributors who have been working on the similar field. For example, it seems common to use the Japanese order for those engaged in traditional activities like Go players.

See also Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles/Naming order for more about this issue, as we are more or less periodically discussing this issue. See also Japanese_name#Japanese_names_in_English for the general information.

Whichever order you choose, please add a redirect page to cover the alternate usage.

For example:

Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川 家康, January 30, 1543–June 1, 1616) was the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate …

but

Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎 Koizumi Jun'ichirō, born January 8, 1942) is a Japanese politician …

Place names

For prefectures, use the form ] without ken, fu, or to, for example, Tochigi Prefecture. As an exception, use the title Hokkaido Prefecture (as Hokkai Prefecture sounds quite awkward.)

For cities, use the form ]; for example, Otaru, Hokkaido.

For districts, use the form ]; for example, Tosa District, Kochi.

For towns and villages, use the form ]; for example, Kamikuishiki, Yamanashi.

For wards in cities, use the form ]; for example, Fushimi-ku, Kyoto. For 23 special wards, use the form ]; for example, Shibuya, Tokyo.

Interwiki links

When linking to the corresponding article in the Japanese Misplaced Pages, omit spaces from the page name. For example a page beginning

Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎 Koizumi Jun'ichirō, born January 8, 1942) …

must be linked as ].

Using Japanese characters on the English Misplaced Pages

Since the conversion of the English Misplaced Pages to the use of the UTF-8 character encoding, most characters used around the world can be directly used in Misplaced Pages articles. Since these characters are supported by the UTF-8 standard they are no longer converted to character references, with the exception of a few characters reserved for usage in HTML, such as the ampersand.

Please be aware however that quite often users from Western countries do not have the fonts installed needed to display kanji and kana.

Suffixes

Capitalize suffixes in place names. For example, Tochigi Prefecture; Kashima District, Ibaraki; Ise Province; Himeji Castle; Tokyo Station.

However, do not capitalize suffixes in the titles of historical periods and events, such as Edo period, Tokugawa shogunate, and Recruit scandal.

See also

• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject Martial Arts

• Misplaced Pages style guidelines