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.

English words with Japanese origin

The en:Wikipedia 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, jiu jitsu, 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 kamakaze, 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 Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English).

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.
   (If you are having difficulty typing these characters with your IME, remember that you can now also click on the special characters below the Wikipedia 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 …

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. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles/Naming order for more about this issue. Either way you choose, please add a redirect page to cover the alternate usage. See also Japanese_name#Japanese_names_in_English.

• Japanese order: family name + given name, for example Tokugawa Ieyasu.
• Western order: given name + family name, for example Junichiro Koizumi.

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 …

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'ichirō, born January 8, 1942) …

must be linked as [[ja:小泉純一郎]].

Converting Japanese characters to HTML numeric character references

In some web browsers (Mozilla and Internet Explorer 5 and 6) you can just type or paste Japanese characters directly into Wikipedia's article editing interface, and they will be converted by your browser to numeric character references before they are uploaded. For example, in such a browser, if you type or paste 神風 into the article editing form and hit Preview, you will get back 神風, which is what your browser actually sent for you.

This usually works, but not always. An explanation follows:

If you type or paste Japanese characters into a form on a web page, most modern browsers will submit the text in the same character encoding as the original form itself.

Typically, Wikipedia's English web pages are served using the ISO 8859-1 encoding, which does not support Japanese characters, hence the need for such characters to manifest in the articles as numeric character references, such as 神 and 風. Thus, when forced to submit Japanese characters through an ISO-8859-1 HTML form, a modern browser, such as Mozilla or Internet Explorer 5 or 6, will typically submit the characters as numeric character references. If the form were encoded in, say, UTF-8, which does support Japanese characters, the characters would be submitted using UTF-8 codes rather than numeric character references, causing the text to be misinterpreted as being ISO-8859-1 by the server, which would result in apparent gibberish.

Please note that

1. there are few standards governing the issues of encoding of HTML form submissions, therefore behavior can vary from browser to browser; and
2. in most browsers, it is possible to override the interpreted encoding of a web page, consequently causing form data submitted from that page to be in that specific encoding.

Therefore, care must be taken to ensure that the browser is correctly configured to submit HTML form data in either the same encoding as the form itself (if the browser has an encoding Auto-Detect feature, making sure it is activated should suffice), or forced to an 8-bit encoding that doesn't support Japanese, such as ISO-8859-1 or ASCII.

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.