Talk:Tomoe

Tomoye-Tomoe article merger

 * Support the merge. "Tomoye" is archaic spelling and most of the information is over on this end anyway.--Mitsukai 20:04, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

meaning
what's the meaning of the tomoe? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 189.27.172.127 (talk) 12:51, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Mitsudomoe
Mitsudomoe seems to be somewhat duplicative, could be merged into this azrticle... AnonMoos (talk) 10:36, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * yes, mitsudomoe should be a section of the tomoe article -- Rising Sun Wiki  16:50, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

In popular culture
I think the 'popular culture' section should be removed. It doesn't add anything to the article, and it makes little sense to list every known instance of a symbol showing up in popular culture. Can you imagine what the Yin and yang article would look like if we started a list of every 'pop culture' reference. -Pollinosisss (talk) 03:14, 18 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Theoretically, selective entries might be kept if they were about the use of the Tomoe as a significant plot-point in a notable literary or cinematic work, or if the use of the Tomoe somewhere had significant impact on the general public's awareness or interpretation of the Tomoe symbol. However, I'm not sure that I see any such cases in the list... AnonMoos (talk) 13:28, 18 March 2010 (UTC)


 * There are lots of pages on Wikipedia with a "in popular culture" section. It would be helpful to the reader to at least include a few examples so he can see the tomoe in use. -- Rising Sun Wiki  22:19, 18 March 2010 (UTC)

Mitsudomoe merger
Mitsudomoe is a kind of Tomoe and should be explained here. I will complete merger.--Shinkansen Fan (talk) 13:49, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
 * Done.--Shinkansen Fan (talk) 15:20, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

Kyujutsu04.jpg
I think the picture(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kyujutsu04.jpg) has no tomoe. These archers has nothing to with tomoe. You can find tomoe symbol on the drum in center-bottom of the following picture. http://edb.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/exhibit/b35/image/05/b35s0074.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 101.111.189.16 (talk) 03:04, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Hiragana?
Is there a source that provides the hiragana for this term? I have an electronic dictionary (Casio XD ST4500) in front of me for the term, which reads the hiragana as ともえ. Is ともゑ historical usage or something else? If so, could we consider some way to distinguish historical and contemporary hiragana with the character? I, JethroBT drop me a line 05:28, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
 * ともゑ is just the historical "spelling". It just changed to the modern ともえ over time, like coöperation →cooperation. We can just make this more explicit in the article, although it currently reads "... tomowe (ともゑ) in its archaic form."   ミーラー強斗武  (StG88ぬ会話) 00:24, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

External links modified
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A fake flag and Wikipedia as the epicenter for the spread of false information
The flag on the left is shown in more than 1,000 pages over multiple wikis (see GlobalUsage). Moreover, the influence of Wikipedia is not limited to the multilingual encyclopedia itself. For example, CONIFA, an organization external to Wikipedia, now heavily uses the flag. However, it is not a genuine flag, as I described in the article. I would like to nominate this incident for Wikipedia's Hall of Shame. In this section, I propose a solution as to how to deal with the disaster.

Before going into the solution, I would like to briefly explain why this is fake and why this incident happened. In the article, I focused on a bibliographical mystery surrounding the flag, but here we don't need to care about it because anyone who has completed Okinawan history 101 would immediately recognize that this flag is fishy. It supposedly belongs to the Shō clan, but their family crest is. Compare this with the fake flag. You can see that the triskelion is facing the opposite direction! By contrast, well-attested banners displayed in the Shō clan's ships, something like, all depict the family crest pointing in the correct direction.

Clicking the GlobalUsage link above, you can see that the overwhelming majority of pages showing the fake flag are Talk pages in English Wikipedia. And you can easily identify the guy who is responsible for spreading the error. He watched the fake flag literally a thousand times and yet was unable to notice the obvious error. In short, the combination of diligence and an exceptionally superficial understanding of a topic one is working on can be disastrous. This appears to be a vulnerability inherent to Wikipedia. In an OSS community, those who cannot write code are naturally excluded from decision-making processes. Wikipedia is the exception. However stupid things one does, no compiler or runtime automatically raises errors or exceptions. The only thing we can rely on is eyeballs, but unfortunately, they do not cover minor topics like Okinawan history.

Disaster recovery is laborious. Of top priority is the main namespace. Here I propose the following set of policies.
 * 1) ✅ This article and possibly some other articles: Explain why this is fake.
 * 2)  CONIFA-related articles: Keep the flag as it is although I don't prevent anyone else from deleting the fake flag. This organization presumably copied misinformation from Wikipedia. But as a neutral observer, we now see this as an extra-Wikipedia phenomenon. We are in a post-truth world!
 * 3) Other pages: Categorically delete the fake flag. Over the week, I have mostly done the job. The most important group of remaining pages are:
 * 4) ✅ Articles with template-based links to Portal:Ryukyu. This stalled portal is essentially a pet project of the very guy who has brought the grave damage to Wikipedia and by extension, the knowledge of mankind. If I have time, (I don't), I would like to nominate many other things for Wikipedia's Hall of Shame. We can propose to replace the fake icon. But given that the portal itself is hopeless, simply removing links from the main namespace is a much better tentative solution.

Non-main namespaces are less important. The overwhelming majority of non-main-namespace uses of the fake flag are template-based links to WikiProject Japan/Ryukyu task force. This is another pet project of the guy who is responsible for spreading the error. It is THE epicenter of misinformation. I am not, and will never be, a member of this task force. So it is actually none my business. But I would suggest keeping the fake icon as it is for three reasons. (1) Again, they are limited to non-main namespaces. (2) Editing a thousand pages is daunting. (3) It serves as a good indicator of the nature of the task force.

Any suggestions are welcome. --Nanshu (talk) 12:53, 24 June 2018 (UTC) Update: 15:51, 28 June 2018 (UTC)


 * MSGJ removed the fake icon from the portal template "for now". Thanks. --Nanshu (talk) 13:34, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

As of June 28, there remain three articles in English Wikipedia that show the fake flag: Tomoe (this article), Confederation of Independent Football Associations and 2018 ConIFA World Football Cup qualification. I must correct a mistake I made earlier. CONIFA does not heavily use the fake flag. The only page showing it is. Also, I found no evidence of the use of the fake flag by the Ryukyu team itself. In Wikipedia, especially in Italian Wikipedia, it is heavily used as the team's icon. But this can be an only-in-Wikipedia phenomenon. --Nanshu (talk) 15:51, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

Mitsudomoe, the Shō clan's family crest, citation, etc
Having reviewed the article, my impression is that there is far too much detail on mitsudomoe, which should, with redirects fixed, be moved to another article: Mitsudomoe. This article does not look as though it is on tomoe, but on one variety of it. The article should be generic. A second point, is that Wikipedia is based on principles of verification and all the sourcing for the mitsudomoe is unpaginated, and can not be verified independently by editors, unless they have access to libraries that contaian those volumes. In this sense it violates WP:V. "All quotations, and any material whose verifiability has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, must include an inline citation that directly supports the material." This should be fixed by the editor who introduced the material.Nishidani (talk) 12:02, 28 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Your concern about balanced development of this article is valid, but it should be on relative weight on the Shō clan's family crest, not on mitsudomoe as a whole because the default form of tomoe is mitsudomoe. It is completely natural that mitsudomoe dominates the article on tomoe. However, mitsudomoe is primarily associated with Hachiman shrines around Japan, which are perhaps followed by Kumano shrines. This article should explain more about the mitsudomoe used as a shrine crest (神紋).
 * Switching to inline citation is a good idea but a too generic suggestion. To facilitate constructive discussion, I would suggest enumerating sources you want to challenge. I cited five books, two academic articles and one newspaper article. Two books have page numbers. And I just added page numbers to the remaining three books. The three articles are all short. So there cannot be much difficulty in locating text fragments in question. --Nanshu (talk) 15:51, 28 June 2018 (UTC)


 * The Okinawa section is way too detailed for an overview of tomoe, and perhaps needs to be forked off into an independent article. It gives the appearance to readers that the whole of the tomoe's complicated cultural history (where do we have a section on the 巴御前?) is fixated on Okinawa, which is absurd.Nishidani (talk) 17:45, 28 June 2018 (UTC)
 * If you have dropped the proposal of the mitsudomoe fork, we are actually not so far from a consensus. The difference is that I think a balance should be achieved through expansion, not by page splitting. 15KB of text is not large enough for page splitting.
 * FYI, the 1926 edition of 日本紋章学 is fully available online: . I hope this book is not severely outdated. --Nanshu (talk) 15:13, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

It is not clear whether this 'abolishment' (incorrect term) refers to 1609 or 1879. If the latter, which is contextually more logical, the term would be annexation'.Nishidani (talk) 07:47, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * "Since it was the royal family's crest, its usage was once severely restricted in Okinawa. Because of this, Okinawans who visited mainland Japan shortly after the abolishment of Ryūkyū were surprised that mitsudomoe banners were flown everywhere"
 * Obviously, Ryūkyū was not abolished in 1609 but in 1879. --Nanshu (talk) 15:13, 29 June 2018 (UTC)

George H. Kerr stated (on p.101 of the 1958 edition) that Hachiman's crest (the three-comma mitsu-domoe) was adopted as the crest of the royal house. It is not clear when he believed the event had happened, but the context suggests that it was during Shō Toku's reign. Kerr cited no source for this statement. So the error should be attributed to his sloppiness. If you want to keep the statement, cite a source that provides a reference to primary sources.

Actually, no such statement appears in primary sources. The first known reference to the foundation of Asato Hachiman Shrine was of the Ryūkyū Shintō-ki by Taichū. And the episode was adopted by the Chūzan Seifu, the Ryūkyū-koku Yurai-ki, and the Ryūkyū-koku Kyūki with some modifications. However, none of them make reference to the mitsudomoe, not to mention the alleged adaptation as the family crest. For reference, the following commentary to the Ryūkyū Shintō-ki is convenient:

In the article, the possible use by the first Shō dynasty has already been mentioned in the paragraph that immediately follows the paragraph with the erroneous statement. That's enough. In my opinion, we should begin with uncontroversial basics: the second Shō dynasty used the mitsudomoe as the family crest, and because it was a family crest, other families were forbidden to use it. And then we should move on to less certain things. --Nanshu (talk) 15:13, 29 June 2018 (UTC) "The young king nevertheless treated the expedition as a great success; an officer was appointed to hold the island, in the king’s interest; the Asato Hachiman shrine was erected at Naha in token of gratitude; and Hachiman’s crest (the three-comma mitsudomoe) was adopted as the crest of the royal family." He then goes on to speak of Sho Toku's subsequent death. Chronologically in this narrative the former precedes the latter.Nishidani (talk) 15:49, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * 'Abolishment/abolished'. Ryūkyū was neither subject to abolishment nor abolished in 1879. In English this suggests Ryūkyū, which people associated with a physical place, was erased from the map, nuked if you like. The proper word is that the Ryukyu Kingdom was annexed by Japan, as I have now edited in.Nishidani (talk) 15:49, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Kerr is RS. It is beyond our remit to question what he writes, unless a secondary source can be retrieved which corrects his statement. One can write 'According to George K. Kerr, but going beyond that would be WP:OR. Demanding that one get the primary source for his statement is improper here, unless we have sources that contest his clear statement that

Long time no see! I've just modified this part with consideration given to attribution and notability. --Nanshu (talk) 06:52, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The attribution to George H. Kerr is needed (American historian George H. Kerr claims that ...). Everyone works on a small, closed set of data. Orikuchi Shinobu, Tanikawa Ken'ichi and Yoshinari Naoki all wrote extensively about the first Shō clan's connection to the Hachiman cult. And yet none of them makes reference to the alleged adoption of the mitsudomoe as the first Shō clan's family crest. So the statement in question cannot survive without a proper attribution.
 * There is no evidence that George H. Kerr thought this statement was so important that he wanted to defend it. To me, he was just sloppy about that. So the notability is questionable. I moved the statement to a footnote, out of respect for you. But I think we can safely delete it.

Shifting the Okinawa material to a new page
I suggest that the Okinawa material, fascinating in its own right, deserves its own page, as it is still WP:Undue compared to the overall article. Okinawa is a minor episode in the mitsudomoe, yet the reader gets the impression it is the dominant story told there.

All it declares here is that no one is willing to write up the complex essential story about the tomoe on the Japanese islands.Nishidani (talk) 14:13, 2 July 2018 (UTC)


 * (My late reply to everything above) All you have to do is flip the flag over (they have two side you know) and it suddenly becomes “correct”: [[file:Flag of Ryukyu.svg|100px]] This isn’t so different than from drawings and paintings showing the American flag being flown from its stripes (horizontally backwards). The shape of the arms of the mitsudomoe has also been criticized, but looking at a photograph from one of the provided sources, clearly this style of mitsudomoe was used along with the so-called standard style. Also, when you create your own flag with your preferred version of its defining features and then present it as evidence that your preference is historical, it’s blatantly WP:OR; it’s not even a well-made image with the symbol being partially cropped.


 * Either way, there is too much about the flag than needs to be in an article about Tomoe in general. I’ll move most of the information to Flag of Ryukyu.  ミーラー強斗武   (StG88ぬ会話) 19:44, 10 July 2018 (UTC)