Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan

Kasane Teto
Could someone from this WP:JAPAN take a look at Kasane Teto? I don't know how the notability of fictional characters are assessed or whether this is related to the scope of this WikiProject (it looks like it might be), but I'm not seeing how this meets (at least at the moment) WP:GNG or even WP:NFICTION. Perhaps there something there worth WP:DRAFTIFYing per WP:NEXIST which is why it's probably better for someone who might be more familiar with this type of article to take a look at it. There is a Japanese Wikipedia article about the subject at ja:重音テト which seems much more developed and which might be a helpful for additonal sourcing and expansion. FWIW, I came across the article via a recent Wikipedia Teahouse question WP:THQ. -- Marchjuly (talk) 08:24, 15 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I have made a major revision to the introduction of the article. Kasane Teto is both a fictional character and software sold as synthetic singing voice software. It is well established both as a fictional character and as synthetic voice software, and I personally consider it to have sufficient NOTABILITY. Although I did not have time to do it this time, I think the article will be further enriched by translating the other half of the Japanese version. 狄の用務員 (talk) 15:29, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for doing that . Just some suggestions for future reference. If you're going to be translating content from a Japanese Wikipedia article into English, please make sure you properly attribute the original source article as explained in WP:TFOLWP; even if you first translate stuff into your user sandbox, you should makes sure to attribute not only for your sandbox but also for the article itself. In addition, if you're going to translating contact from Japanese Wikipedia and taking citations directly from Japanese Wikipedia, please remember things likes MOS:LQ and MOS:ALLCAPS, and make sure to convert the citation into a format accpetable for English Wikipedia (including updating the access-date after verifying the source). Japanese Wikipedia doesn't really follow MOS:MOS so you can find lots different styles of being used for non-Japanese words MOS:ALLCAPS, and it often uses zenkaku characters for brackets, punctuation marks, spaces, etc. It would also be helpful if you could use the script-title, title, language and trans-title parameters when adding citations to Japanese sources because it makes things that much easier for the reader. If you're not sure how to use these parameters, you can find examples in Template:cite web. Finally, since Japanese Wikipedia doesn't really need to worry about MOS:ENGVAR and MOS:DATEUNIFY when it comes to its articles, please try to remain consistent with the style chosen by the article's creator when adding dates or other text content. Doing so may help reduce the amount of cleanup need later on and helps article remain consistent stylistically. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:17, 17 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I misunderstood that an addition was demanded, but it is not. I tried to do what I could knowing about my writing abilities, but sorry for the hassle. I will keep this in mind for future reference. I apologize for not being able to edit in a beautiful style. 狄の用務員 (talk) 12:02, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Kaichi Watanabe - links for employers
I'm improving (I hope) the article for Japanese engineer Kaichi Watanabe. This brief article lists his employers later in his life. It lists their names under their late-19th century / early 20th century incarnations. I'm trying to resolve each to their current names/owners. Two I have problems with: Thanks for your help. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 10:22, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * "Kansai Gas Company" - is that Osaka Gas?
 * "Hokuestsu Railway Company" - I know there's a modern Hokuetsu line, which runs on the Hokuriku Main Line, and Shinetsu Main Line. Was Hokuetsu Railway Company the company that originally operated those those two lines? Is Hokuetsu a portmanteaux of Hokuriku and Shinetsu?


 * Looking at a the Google Translate of his ja.wikipedia article, it seems he had an even more extensive career back in Japan that that. But I'm not confident about adding detail from that (not least because of WP:CIRCULAR), and because I can't read the references it cites. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 10:29, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Hokuetsu Railway Company (the Hokuestsu typo leads me to believe the Glasgow source is not great) was nationalized under the Railway Nationalization Act in 1907. We don't have an article on the original company, which ran a line between Niigata and Naoetsu from 1895 to 1907. It would seem anachronistic to link to a more modern line. I don't know what the gas company is, but I doubt it is Osaka Gas. Dekimasu よ! 03:43, 22 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your help. Yes, I was reluctant to link a modern line for the reason you say. I'll leave it for now. I imagine if someone fills out the relevant topics at some future date, they'll find Watanabe's article and link/fix accordingly. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 09:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Extremely Inappropriate!
I recently created an article for the 2024 series Extremely Inappropriate!. It may be of interest to members of this project. Thriley (talk) 17:01, 21 June 2024 (UTC)


 * May need a plot section. ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 06:21, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Akira Watanabe (chess)
Would someone from WP:JAPAN mind taking a look at Akira Watanabe (chess) and assessing it for notability for reasons other than being a chess player? (I've asked about that at WT:CHESS.) The current focus of the article and claim of notability seem to be the subject's chess achievements, but there might be other things the subject is also Wikipedia notable for. The article also appears to be a translation of the Japanese Wikipedia article ja:渡辺暁 (based on User talk:Ebefl) but is lacking proper attribution per WP:TFOLWP. The attribution part most likely can be "fixed", but a lack of notability can't. The Japanese Wikipedia article does seem to be pretty much the same content-wise and is also basically only supported by a single WP:PRIMARY source (the other sources listed as "references" seem more like "explanatory notes"). -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Seems really problematic at first glance. Will look further in a few days as I am busy. ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 08:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * @Marchjuly, I've tagged the article for CSD A7 because it only cites a single source, fails GNG and even the jawiki version has no sign of establishing notability. ABG (Talk/Report any mistakes here) 06:16, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Research resources
Hi, I'm trying to compile information on Noriaki Kiguchi (木口宣昭) to write an English language article. He was a wrestler for the Japanese national team that became a coach, founding his own dojo/school, influenced the development of wrestling and MMA in Japan, and trained several notable wrestlers and MMA fighters. I've found some info on the internet (in English and Japanese by using his name) and a surprising lot of coverage in archived American newspapers thanks to the WP Library. However, I would still like to find more Japanese-language resources, but I have no knowledge of Japanese, just Google Translate. I've tried several of the top newspapers with his name but haven't had much luck, but I know the coverage is out there. I'd appreciate all the help/direction that I can get. Spagooder (talk) 23:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Converting full-width punctuation and currency symbols in horizontal text
Greetings! Over the past few years, there have been no objections to converting Latin letters and Arabic numerals to ASCII from their full-width forms when they appear in horizontal Chinese, Korean, or Japanese text. I've raised it on MOS and Wikiproject talk pages and made many cleanup edits to articles. I'm making a push to finish that cleanup, and I've been noticing that punctuation, currency symbols, and spaces have the same problem. It looks weird to have the full-width versions mixed in, and they sometimes leak into English-language text. My plan was to start converting punctuation and currency symbols in horizontal text (except where the characters themselves are being discussed) when the July 1 database dump becomes available in a week or two. If you have any questions, objections, concerns, or suggestions, please let me know! Open-circle full stop is not included; the affected characters are: ＂ ＃ ＄ ％ ＆ ＇ ＊ ＋ － ／ ＠ ＼ ＾ ＿ ｀ ￠ ￥ ￦ ＜ ＝ ＞ ｜ ￤ and the space character. -- Beland (talk) 17:51, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
 * In general this sounds like no problem. I am not sure about the following: ＊ － ＜ ＞.
 * ＊ is often equivalent to a bullet point rather than an asterisk.
 * － is no problem if the characters are really intending minuses rather than dashes.
 * ＜ and ＞ are often used to denote parts of titles or quotations and in these cases are not equivalent to . In running horizontal text in Japanese, I don't think they should always be converted to half-width brackets. Is there any editorial judgment involved in converting these? Dekimasu よ! 03:05, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * OK, I will exclude these characters from substitution unless I find them outside CJK text. -- Beland (talk) 04:48, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * If you mean basically a global replace on certain characters, I think this is a Bad Idea. Almost certainly the number of places where this makes things worse will be equal to or greater than the number of places where it makes things better. Fundamentally Japanese ("CJK") typography is incompatible with English ("Roman") typography; and the "full-width" terminology hopelessly confuses two separate issues: typography and encoding. So I think if there is a bit of Japanese text including any of these characters it is only wise to change them after looking carefully at the particular case, and even then I can't see why the change is necessary. Your point about people jumbling these characters into the middle of English text is valid, of course... (but there are much worse problems; try searching Electromagnetic vortex intensifier with ferromagnetic particles for "ABC", then try searching for "АВС"). Imaginatorium (talk) 04:00, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * What are you looking for in terms of "better" and "compatibility"? What terminology would you prefer to refer to the above-listed characters? -- Beland (talk) 05:01, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't quite understand your question, but basically you are the one advocating the change, so it's your job to say why the change is an improvement. If all typography were done rationally then there would be no significance to the so-called "full-width" (全角) encodings, since they only represent typographical variants, not distinct E-characters (the "E" means that I am speaking English, and specifically exclude any Unicode terminology). But it's all messy, and any sort of mindless replacement is fraught with error. For example, (I know it's not in your list) in the previous sentence I enclosed a Japanese word in parenthesis with separating spaces; I could have used "full-width" parentheses, but in that case there would be no (extra) separating spaces. So perhaps you could give us some examples of how the change makes an improvement.
 * (Bit later) I see what you mean by "terminology", I think... The "full-width" thing is hopelessly confused and confusing, since a normal Roman 'A' is full-width already. But we are stuck with it. But anyway, I think it is likely that if you are quoting Japanese (or any CJK), the original encoding is more likely to give an appropriate result. Imaginatorium (talk) 09:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * It is certainly possible to make an ASCII U+0041 "A" just as typographically wide as a U+FF21 fullwidth "Ａ" (in the sense of the "East Asian width" Unicode character property described at Halfwidth and fullwidth forms) with the right font or CSS choices, but with default settings on Wikipedia, the ASCII "A" is narrower, and Latin-alphabet letters actually vary in rendered width, and do not span the full width of nearby kanji and kana.
 * "Preserve the original source encoding" is a bit of an incomplete answer, because different native Japanese sources encode the same text differently, and can also be mechanistically problematic. For example, looking at the references in Yawara!, I see that some have used ASCII Latin letters and some have used fullwidth Latin letters. This creates the same problem you note above in your Cyrillic "ABC" example; readers searching the page for "Yawara" as typed on an English-language keyboard match some but not all of the instances of that word (depending on their web browser's matching algorithm). This is why we've decided to convert all fullwidth Latin letters to ASCII, for consistency. -- Beland (talk) 21:17, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * (Bit later still)... I just read your comments above more carefully, and you say: "It looks weird to have the full-width versions mixed in... [with Japanese text]". Really? This is the way Japanese is normally written (typeset), so it could presumably only look weird to someone who is not used to reading Japanese, surely?? Imaginatorium (talk) 09:12, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking of mix-ins like "1＋1＝LOVE" in the midst of other Japanese text, which looks weird compared to "1+1=LOVE", especially in the context of a page that's mostly English text. Something like "１＋１＝ＬＯＶＥ" looks more normal (if it's in mixed in with Japanese inherently wide characters) because it's consistent, but it's currently not allowed because we already convert the numbers and letters to ASCII. The mixture of narrow and fullwidth characters also means that a search for "1+1" on the page (as entered on an English-language keyboard) may fail to match all instances of this expression. -- Beland (talk) 21:25, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Aye, there are simply a lot of edge cases. Remsense  诉  23:29, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * What is a "mix-in"? You do not read Japanese: how on earth can you comment on whether something written in Japanese "looks weird"? What is an "inherently wide character"? I understand the problem of searching, although ultimately the only solution to this is to understand that Unicode is not a rationally coherent encoding of real writing, because it has (by remit) to support every rationally incoherent encoding in every national character set. There are not really two different E-characters "roman A with different typographical behaviour", any more than there are two different E-characters for Romance ordinal superscripts underlined or not, or two different pound signs with single or double crossing. So Unicode can never natively support useful searching. But the answer has to be thoughtful changes, not mindless global replacement.
 * I found a couple of your changes: one replaced a single-character-space three dot thing (…) with three ASCII dots (...). I don't read Korean -- so I would not dream of editing anything written in Korean unless very clearly a syntax error -- but the same is true in Japanese: the three dots are on the "reference line" (term I just made up, referring to the baseline in Roman typography and the centre line in CJK typography). So you have just made this look seriously weird, since the three dots are now on the Roman baseline, which properly does not exist in CJK typography. Bizarrely, I just chanced on the same CJK so-called "full-width" character in some blog software, appearing at the end of article "summaries": canal blog. And "in English"! these three dots indeed appear on the baseline, and _could_ be replaced by "..."... . I suggest all of changes of this particular U-character should be reverted.
 * Then I found the address of a Japanese school in Greece: Pefki. Mindlessly replacing just the zenkaku Roman resulted in an even worse mess.
 * Bots can be useful, but any sort of mindless replacement in this sort of way is, as I suggested at the beginning, likely to do more harm than good. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:00, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * "1＋1＝LOVE" is not Japanese; it's math mixed with English. By "mix-ins" I mean full-width Latin characters mixed into strings of narrow Latin characters, which does not seem like a context in which they should appear. In this example, we have six narrow characters, "1", "1", and "LOVE", and two full-width characters, the plus and the equals. Would you not regard that combination as an error in a formal Japanese document? Do you not consider the result visually displeasing compared to consistently using either narrow or full-width Latin characters? -- Beland (talk) 06:59, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * With regard to Pefki, I'm afraid it's extremely visually difficult to tell the difference between a full-width comma and an ASCII comma followed by an ASCII space. I can think of two ways of preventing this type of error in the future and fixing any other instances no one has yet noticed. One is to convert all full-width commas to ASCII, and the other is to scan for full-width characters in contexts where they probably don't belong (e.g. ASCII letters and numbers and punctuation). -- Beland (talk) 07:03, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Halfwidth and fullwidth forms explains the concept of inherently (its word is "naturally") wide characters. -- Beland (talk) 07:10, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Which article are you referring to where I changed an ellipsis in Korean text? I could not find any in my most recent edits, but I have a lot of edits. I did find an ellipsis substitution in Japanese here.
 * MOS:ELLIPSES requires use of three ASCII periods "..." instead of the single character "…" U+2026. There are no exceptions given for other languages. If you want to change that, you would need to seek consensus on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. The idea that these dots must be vertically centered in Japanese typography does not appear to be correct, according to Japanese punctuation, which says in horizontal text they can appear either on the baseline or vertically centered. I assume the difference is a matter of house style, and Wikipedia is free to choose one or the other.
 * While investigating, I figured out something that may be confusing: inside lang when "ja" is specified, the single-character ellipsis is vertically centered as rendered here in Firefox (because the template adds a lang="ja" HTML property). But if the language is set in HTML properties to English (as is the page default on English Wikipedia), it's rendered on the baseline. This behavior is rather unusual; I would only expect to render vertically centered, and that's a separate character I'm not substituting. A series of three ASCII periods does not change in this way, which is expected.
 * I'm not a bot; I do manually review all changes before they are made - I just need to have actionable guidelines for me as a person to decide whether or not a given potential change should or shouldn't be made. "Be thoughtful, not mindless" sounds like good advice, but I'm not sure what specifically you are advocating when you say that or "the only solution to this is to understand that Unicode is not a rationally coherent encoding of real writing". Is there a different way that you would solve the search problem that doesn't involve normalizing each grapheme to a single Unicode character? -- Beland (talk) 07:56, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * To get a better sense of how ASCII characters are used in horizontal CJK text, I did a search of the latest database dump. It turns out there are plenty of instances of ASCII "+" in Japanese text where there are no Latin letters or Arabic numbers (e.g. "アイススレッジホッケー・ナショナルチーム　選手名鑑 + 監督による、選手への一言. ") in addition to situations where there are (e.g. "超!A&G+") and the same for Chinese (e.g. "王丹妮+梁仲恆入圍兩大演員獎　與鍾雪瑩+柯煒林+馮皓揚爭最佳新演員" and "《正義迴廊》3月25日登陸 Disney+"). Changing the fullwidth plus signs to ASCII would appear to increase consistency without violating any absolute typographic rules. -- Beland (talk) 19:59, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
 * BTW, all non-Latin words are supposed to be transliterated into Latin characters. I'm not sure how to transliterate "АВС" from Cyrillic to fix the search-in-page problem on Electromagnetic vortex intensifier with ferromagnetic particles; would anyone here know how to do that? -- Beland (talk) 23:00, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Maybe "AVS", given the chart on Romanization of Russian? -- Beland (talk) 23:54, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, you could also puzzle out why there is a redirect notice at the top of ОТМА. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:01, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Is that a "yes" in the sense that I should edit Electromagnetic vortex intensifier with ferromagnetic particles to indicate that "AVS" is the Latin transliteration of Cyrillic "АВС"? I don't see any problems with OTMA, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. -- Beland (talk) 06:46, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't speak Russian, so I do not in general make edits concerning the Russian language, but I see you are not so inhibited. Basically А is A, В is V (even though I have to press 'W' on my keyboard), and С is S. Did you follow my link to ОТМА, and did you not notice the "redirected" message at the top? Imaginatorium (talk) 09:36, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, there's a reason I'm asking others who may have more expertise. Yes, the redirect to OTMA is from the Cyrillic characters which are visually identical. Still not sure why you bring it up; it doesn't appear there's anything against guidelines or confusing about that. -- Beland (talk) 16:13, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I've added to "AVS" to Electromagnetic vortex intensifier with ferromagnetic particles. -- Beland (talk) 16:17, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Unequal treaty
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Unequal treaty that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Remsense 诉  18:06, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Independent, Reputable Sources for Theatre
Hello. I'm trying to update information about Japanese theatre. Pages like Theater of Japan, Category:Japanese Musicals etc. are so empty it's scary, when there's so much going on here that's so vibrant.

Apparently, Stage Natalie, Oricon, and the like aren't considered reputable sources because they don't have bylines. Yomiuri Shinbun, Asahi Shinbun and the like don't do theatre reviews the way the New York Times does. But these are major productions by Toho and producers like that. They're as high quality as anything on Broadway. I'm mostly concerned with original shows, since they aren't represented at all. With adaptations, like In This Corner of the World, I can add the musical information to the page of the source. But they still won't show up under the Japanese musicals category if the musical doesn't have its own page. I did find newspaper articles about In This Corner of the World, but not about original productions like Isabeau, Cross Road, that Mouldman Bellringer thing that's at Tokyo International Forum Hall C now...

There were articles in English and Japanese about Shakespeare in Year 12 of the Tempo Era, but I haven't seen that (I want to see it this winter) so if anyone has seen it, can you please help with making a page for it?

I just feel like there must be reputable, independent source coverage of something like Isabeau. It was such a major event. Nozomi Futo has a column in one of the newspapers, that was the only thing that came up when I searched it. The Japan Times didn't cover it at all.

Can anyone please tell me why these things don't get covered, and where to find better coverage? I'm buying issues of Musical magazine, but that's only one source. EncreViolette (talk) 09:27, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Draft:NTsKi
I recently created a draft for Japanese artist and musician NTsKi. Any help with translation would be appreciated. I have no knowledge of the Japanese language. Best, Thriley (talk) 16:14, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Galaxy 2 (disambiguation)
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Galaxy 2 (disambiguation) that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject.  98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂  •  [𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺]   22:33, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Kiritsubo Consort
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Kiritsubo Consort that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe Edits! Talk! 22:51, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Need eyes at Menhera
I have removed what I think is an inappropriate image from this article. The matter could use review by more knowledgeable folks, especially if another image could be suggested. Mangoe (talk) 02:26, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Shamoji
There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Shamoji that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. RodRabelo7 (talk) 11:47, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Anyone have this book?
Me and Goroth are trying to expand the article Chiisana Koi no Uta and we came across this book Heisei no hitto-kyoku (平成のヒット曲) the ISBN number is 978-4-10-610929-4. If someone have this book, expand the article for us. Thanks : ) Warm Regards, Miminity (talk) (contribs) 12:33, 20 July 2024 (UTC)


 * I'd be grateful if someone can provide more information regarding the song itself with help of that book. --Goroth (talk) 14:20, 20 July 2024 (UTC)