Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles

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

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

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 (rōmaji Kanji)

or

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 (Fuji-san 富士山) is the highest mountain on the island of Honshu …

Romanization

Wikipedia 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. For example, Tōkyō 東京.
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 followed by a vowel or y is written n'.

However, article titles must use short vowels (for example, Tokyo) and omit apostrophes after syllabic n (for example, Koizumi Junichiro) 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.

How to know the Unicode for Japanese characters

Just type Japanese characters into the Google search engine, it returns a page with the corresponding HTML character entity references. For example, if you type or paste 神風 you get back 神風.

The Mozilla web browser will automatically convert Japanese characters into HTML character entities, and is recommended for inputting Japanese text on Wikipedia.

Names

In general, use the form of a person's name that is most widely known and used by English speakers. This is what people expect to see and it is what they will search for and link to. If the name is not widely known and used by English speakers, then stick to the Japanese order. Either way, please add a redirect page to cover the alternate usage.

• Japanese order: family name + given name, for example Tokugawa Ieyasu.
• Western order: given name + family name, for example Akira Kurosawa.

For example:

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

Interwiki links

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

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

must be linked as [[ja:小泉純一郎]].