Talk:Saishū Onoe

Untitled
For an October 2004 deletion debate over this page see Votes for deletion/Saishu Onoe

Why is Saishu Onoe in the Wikipedia? My recommendation is that it should probably be deleted.

When I did a Google search, I found only a very small number of pages that were not Wikipedia mirrors, and those were Japanese pages that only had birth and death dates for Saishu Onoe and not much more. It looks like he is probably a rather insignificant tanka poet. I would say that as a rough rule of thumb, if a 20th century tanka poet isn't in Makoto Ueda's Modern Japanese Tanka, Columbia Univ. Press ISBN 0-231-10433-2, then they probably shouldn't be in the Wikipedia. Currently only three of the poets in Ueda's book are in the Wikipedia, Masaoka Shiki, Yosano Akiko, and Tawara Machi. There are probably three or four more from Ueda's list that might be added. Yosano Tekkan should probably be one -- not so much for his own poetry, but for his work as an editor, and for starting the rehabilitation nad rediscovery of tanka/waka poetry. gK 17:23, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I did some more digging and found a few more tanka poets from Ueda's book. Since they were primarily fiction writers, they were listed only under Category:Japanese authors and not under category:Japanese poets. They are: Mori Ogai, Ishikawa Takuboku, and Kenji Miyazawa. That makes seven of the twenty in Ueda's book. I'll be adding an entry for Yosano Tekkan since he already has a link under List of Japanese authors:Y. gK 08:14, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Furthermore, if there isn't an entry in the Japanese Wikipedia, that is also probably a good sign that this an insignificant entry. gK 12:28, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I initiated a Vote for Deletion on Oct 13 2004. Below is some of what I wrote.


 * gK again: I'm still pretty new at this wikipedia stuff, and this is my first nomination for deletion. In looking through all Votes for deletion, I haven't seen the nominator come back with further argument, but I'm going to do it anyway. I probably didn't make my reason for nominating this article very clear. This is a waka (or tanka) poet who has never been translated into English as far as I can tell. The odds are that he may not get translated into English, and I feel pretty certain he will never have a book of his poetry translated into English. It does look like there is at least one book of his in print in Japan -- another search at   the Japanese amazon.com found two books . He may be worthy of entry in the Japanese Wikipedia (sooner or later) &, but I think that an entry in the English version is pretty useless at the moment.  gK 09:17, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * PS: As for Maeda Yugure, it does look like he has some significance as both a poet and editor, so he should at least be in the Japanese Wikipedia. See: Memorial Room of Yugure Maeda at the Hadano Municipal Library. gK
 * PSS: I just checked the modern era volume from Donald Keene's monumental four volume history of Japanese Literature, Dawn to the West. Onoe Saishû gets two very brief mentions, so I could probably rewrite that info to turn the Onoe substub into a stub if the final vote is to keep (by my vote is still for delete). Maeda Yûgure gets three pages as one of the "Naturalist Poets", but doesn't rate his own chapter subhead, so even he is probably a candidate for only the Japanese Wikipedia, although I did enjoy the few poems of his in Keene's book. gK

The Vote for Deletion failed. I guess if the if the Wikipedia can have over a dozen separate articles on different characters in Frank Herbert's SF novel Dune, then there is room for this poet as well. I still think that this poet is a good candidate for deletion from the English-language Wikipedia, and suggest that someone else take up the challenge after three months has passed. gK 08:07, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Page move
(from WP:RM)

Saishu Onoe &rarr; Onoe Saishu

 * Currently the main article is at Saishu Onoe and the redirect is at Onoe Saishu. Unfortunately this is backwards since the normal name order for Japanese names is surname, clan name, or family name first, and then the given name or penname, so his name is Onoe Saishu. This is a fairly obscure early 20th century Japanese tanka poet, so we don't have to worry about how he is known in the Western world (where modern authors and politicians, for example, are usually referred to using the Western order of naming). gK 06:44, 28 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Maybe I'm not understanding the point of this page, but couldn't this just be proposed on the article's talk page and then moved. I moved it since the redirect had no history and the move would create no double redirects. If anyone objects, they can just move it back. Angela. 03:21, Oct 30, 2004 (UTC)
 * I see that this is now fixed (although the change didn't show up in my Watch List). Thank you. I asked for the move because I'm pretty new at all this Wikipedia stuff, and quite frankly, when I looked up how to do a move, the instructions made little sense to me (and I had also seen problems caused when newbies have done it incorrectly). The reason I asked for the move is the way it was previously listed was like having George Washington under Washington George. gK
 * The problem here is that there is no good standard in the West for how to write Japanese names. If you use, people who don't know anything about Japan (the majority of our readers) get it horribly wrong. (Which is exactly why newspapers write about Japanese politicians, etc using  .) My personal opinion is to follow that, so that unless they are well-known in the West under the Japanese-order name, the article should go at the Western-order, with a redirect (if desired) from the Japanese order. After all, we aren't writing the names the way these people would, either - we are transliterating into English characters - and this is an English-language encyclopaedia. With  order, most Japan-savvy people will recognize the likely family and individual names, and figure out which order they are in, which is something the ordinary readers cannot do. Noel (talk) 19:24, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Yes there is a very good standard. If you look at Manual of Style (Japan-related articles) it says "use the form of a person's name that is most widely known and used by English speakers". There are very few cases where this doesn't provide a very clear standard. That means that for almost everybody except for recent Japanese politicians and business people, and some recent Japanese authors that person is know, even to English speakers, by their family name-given name order. This is true, for example, for noted haiku poets such as Matsuo Basho and Masaoka Shiki. The same family name-first name order is used for all Japanese historical names, such as Murasaki Shikibu. The current Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, however, is referred to in the given name-family name order, as well as the modern author Banana Yoshimoto. On the other hand, if you look at Category:Japanese authors you will see that almost everyone except Banana Yoshimoto, including the highly popular modern Japanese tanka poet Tawara Machi are in family name-first name order. [Personal opinion: The fact that newspapers refer to Japanese politicians and business men by their first name-last name order is highly inconsistent since they refer to Korean and Chinese politicians by their last name-first name order.] gK 21:41, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)