Talk:Shōhei Imamura/Archive 1

Untitled
I have added his obituary as an external reference and changed the title from external links to external references. Capitalistroadster 19:21, 30 May 2006 (UTC)


 * R.I.P. Shohei Imamura. Not enough of his movies out on DVD here in the U.S. He was one of the best. -- Rizzleboffin 20:00, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Requested move to Shohei Imamura

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the proposal was moved. --BDD (talk) 18:04, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Shōhei Imamura → Shohei Imamura – By WP:JATITLE, Use the form personally or professionally used by the person  - All movie posters, DVD covers, and film title credits for this director which I was able to locate use "Shohei" without a macron:,, , , etc. Use the form publicly used on behalf of the person in the English-speaking world - The director is generally referred to without a macron: , etc. JoshuSasori (talk) 01:33, 31 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Support. IMO, the "form personally or professionally used" standard is incompatible with Wikipedia's policy of following the secondary sources. But here are some books by well-known film critics that give this name marconless: One Thousand One Movies You Must See Before You Die, Roger Ebert's Video Companion, and The Donald Richie Reader. Kauffner (talk) 14:18, 31 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It's unusual to spell a person's name in a way that the person himself or herself does not agree with. In the case of naming, secondary sources-based rules probably will not much disagree with the existing rules we have. But if the policy changes to "secondary sources", I will make the same requested move. The problem Wikipedia has is not what kind of sources, it is quite simply that no sources were used. People have spelt the names of Japanese individuals based on formulaic or mechanical romanization of the kana, rather than sources, primary or secondary. JoshuSasori (talk) 14:58, 31 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Support. It's how he is professionally known, what he personally uses, and what reliable sources use. The trifecta of agreement! The only thing which it isn't is a pure rendering of the Japanese language name, but the current title doesn't fulfill that purpose anyway, since it uses Western naming order. Shrigley (talk) 02:25, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

External links modified
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 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20060510061815/http://www.austinchronicle.com:80/issues/dispatch/1999-10-29/screens_feature7.html to http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/1999-10-29/screens_feature7.html

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External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121228155810/http://www.eiga.ac.jp/about/history to http://www.eiga.ac.jp/about/history

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Requested move 8 October 2020

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Moved  (t &#183; c)  buidhe  05:10, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Shohei Imamura → Shōhei Imamura

Of the three editors who supported the previous RM back in 2012, two were site-banned shortly thereafter for reasons directly (Kauffner) or indirectly (JoshuSasori) related to their consistent "anti-diacritic" stance, and the other is no longer active, so the RM's status as a precedent is questionable to begin with.

The 2012 RM cited movie posters and DVD covers -- the links are all, naturally, broken now, but searching for promotional materials for his two most famous films now, I found three pages on the Cannes website that mostly spell his name with a circonflexe as "Shôhei IMAMURA" (this is common in French-language texts about Japan, since circonflexes are native to French but macrons are not, while English, which doesn't have any common native diacritics, uses the macron; compare with ) but other Japanese names like the composer "Shinichiro IKEBE", the actor "Koji YAKUSHO" and the character "Takuro Yamashita" with no diacritic. Does this mean Imamura personally preferred the long vowel in his name be indicated?); the French poster for Unagi writes his name in all-caps and so does the French thing by leaving off all diacritics, and various English posters such as this one put great emphasis on the film's Palme d'Or status, write his name in all-caps, and also follow the French style. Narayama is a bit more complicated -- this poster (?) writes his name in all-caps but does use the circonflexe (despite being in English), while this apparently much older one is not in all-caps but leaves off any diacritics and this French one does the same.

Given this, it would seem that, if Imamura had any personal preference, in 1983 he preferred no diacritic (or had no preference) but changed his mind by 1997, then in 2012 some English Wikipedia editors claimed that "Shohei Imamura" had been the form personally or professionally used by the person; more likely, though, I'd say Imamura was like 99% of Japanese and didn't really mind how foreign-language texts spelled his name in non-Japanese scripts, and so we get Routledge's Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts writing his name with a macron, Jasper Sharp's Historical Dictionary of Japanese Cinema using a circumflex, and Cinematheque Ontario's Shohei Imamura no diacritic. Given this, we might turn to WP:COMMONNAME, but: (i) it has historically been very difficult to use search engines, which are made (or deliberately optimized?) to ignore diacritics, to determine whether a macronned form of a Japanese name is more or less common than the circumflexed or the undiacriticized; (ii) the large number of mainstream, reliable sources cited above that exclusively use one or another apparently without comment indicates that none will hurt the subject's recognition to readers familiar with any other form; and (iii) when it comes to variations on the Hepburn system of romanization of Japanese names, it's debatable whether or not (ii) always applies regardless of whether reliable sources are present to demonstrate as much and therefore COMMONNAME may not apply to such matters to begin with (the examples cited at WP:COMMONNAME, which all show clearly very different names such as "Bono" vs. "Paul Hewson", would seem to support this).

TLDR: There's inconsistency among English and other European reliable sources, and no evidence that Imamura himself personally or professionally used one form or another, so we should default to Wikipedia's MOS, which is also in accord with the most widely-used English-language scholarly literature on Japanese topics.

Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 14:30, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment the macron is helpful to readers interested in Japan topics. But generally this should probably be a MOS-driven issue. It certainly would be very useful for historical Japanese names where vowel length can be more unpredictable. But taking names on a case by case basis, that could lead to the sort of "Is this Puerto-Rican living person hispanic enough, or shall we anglo-wash them?" RMs we have seen. Not a super attractive prospect. MOS is best driven by MOS. In ictu oculi (talk) 14:56, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:19, 8 October 2020 (UTC)