Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan

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WikiProject Japan (Talk)
Founded: 18 March 2006 (20 years, 7 months and 24 days ago) Articles: 109,522 (211 featured)
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Recognition {{WPJ-Barnsensu}} (recipients)   {{WikiProject Japan Barnstar 2.0}} (recipients)   {{The Japan Barnstar of National Merit}} (recipients)   {{The Most Noble Barnstar of National Honor}} (recipients)
Templates {{WikiProject Japan}}   {{Japan current era date}}   {{Japanese}}   {{nihongo}}   {{Nihongo2}}   {{Nihongo3}}   {{Nihongo foot}}   {{Needhiragana}}   {{Needkanji}}
Userboxes {{User WikiProject Japan}}   {{User WP Japan}}
Project parentage Asia, Countries, East Asia, Geography
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Japanese–English translation review request: Draft:Masato Suzuki (musician)

Could an editor proficient in Japanese and English review the translation and sources in Draft:Masato Suzuki (musician)? The draft includes AI-assisted translation from Japanese Wikipedia, and its AfC submission was declined pending human translation review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Masato_Suzuki_(musician) Thank you for your help. ~2026-50811-40 (talk) 12:52, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

I can take a look. I am a Japanese to English translator. NevinThompson (talk) 17:48, 10 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you very much for offering to help, NevinThompson. I would appreciate your review of the translation in Draft:Masato Suzuki (musician) against the Japanese article and its sources. Please let me know if any corrections are needed. When you have completed the review, could you also leave a note on the draft’s talk page so that the AfC reviewer can see the outcome? Thank you for your time. ~2026-50811-40 (talk) 14:38, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

@NevinThompson: Thank you again for offering to review Draft:Masato Suzuki (musician). I wanted to follow up to ask whether you might still have time to check the translation against the Japanese article and its sources. There is no rush, and I appreciate that this is volunteer work. If any corrections are needed, please let me know. Once the review is complete, a brief note on the draft’s talk page would help the AfC reviewer. Many thanks for your help. ~2026-50811-40 (talk) 21:03, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Sure! It's a bit of a job, it turns out! I wonder if we could start with a shorter version of the article? With that in mind, what are the key points? NevinThompson (talk) 22:08, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you very much—that sounds like a good approach. I would be happy to start with a shorter article focusing on his education and career, his work as principal conductor of Bach Collegium Japan, major awards, and a small selection of representative recordings. The detailed performance history and longer lists of compositions and recordings can be left out of the initial version. Please feel free to suggest which points are best supported by the sources and most appropriate to retain. Thank you again for your time and help with the review. ~2026-50811-40 (talk) 11:34, 18 October 2026 (UTC)

Sengoku-period cleanup worklist

Hi all. I've started working through articles on the Sengoku and Azuchi–Momoyama periods (1467–1615) that carry maintenance tags, beginning with Toyotomi Hideyoshi. My worklist is at User:NevinThompson/Sengoku cleanup: about 225 articles, sorted by the kind of work needed (prose, content and sourcing).

Two places where help or advice would be welcome:

• Several long articles are tagged for copy editing, including Takeda Shingen, Sakai Tadatsugu and Miyamoto Musashi.
• I'm checking old-calendar date conversions against the NAOJ calendar database, since lunisolar, Julian and Gregorian dates often get mixed up. If there's a settled project convention for presenting these dates, I'd be glad to hear it.

Feel free to add to the list or take on any of the articles. NevinThompson (talk) 17:47, 10 October 2026 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Kentaro Sato

The article Kentaro Sato has been proposed for deletion because it appears to have no references. Under Wikipedia policy, this biography of a living person will be deleted after seven days unless it has at least one reference to a reliable source that directly supports material in the article. The nominator also raised the following concern:

only source is his own website.

If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp/dated}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within seven days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. Bearian (talk) 23:36, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

Akiko Nishina

Please add reliable sources to this stub. Thank you for your help. Bearian (talk) 01:02, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Kaori Oguri

The article Kaori Oguri has been proposed for deletion because it appears to have no references. Under Wikipedia policy, this biography of a living person will be deleted after seven days unless it has at least one reference to a reliable source that directly supports material in the article. The nominator also raised the following concern:

only sources are IMDb and other fan-created sites.

If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider improving the article. For help on inserting references, see Referencing for beginners, or ask at the help desk. Once you have provided at least one reliable source, you may remove the {{prod blp/dated}} tag. Please do not remove the tag unless the article is sourced. If you cannot provide such a source within seven days, the article may be deleted, but you can request that it be undeleted when you are ready to add one. Bearian (talk) 15:21, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

IPA transcriptions for Japanese

@Mazamadao: has recently changed many IPA transcriptions of Japanese terms, with two or three cited references, all being reliable "Pronunciation dictionaries", to what seems to me an extremely narrow phonetic transcription. @Ushitarou: more recently (essentially) changed this back at kanji with the edit summary "changed japanese ipa to be more readable...". I think it would be productive to discuss this here.

First, Mazamadao, it would help if you can clarify the cited references: these typically have the word アクセント ("accent") in the title, so they presumably support the pitch accent indication. But are they written in IPA? (Could you perhaps show us a representative example?).

Of course IPA is an essential tool, and I am reasonably familiar with it, so that transcriptions of French or Russian, for example, seem obvious, and are essential. But these ("less readable") transcriptions are largely a mystery to me. I have never seen pitch accent represented by acute and grave accents - is that a standard convention somewhere? (I have an extra problem; I live in Tochigi, and we do things differently...) And there are all sorts of added marks dotted around. I previously suggested that for Japanese IPA there might be 17 people in the world who would be helped by it. I.e., they do not already know how to pronounce Japanese from the Hepburn, but can generate it from the IPA. Perhaps this is an exaggeration - there must be 100s (1000s?) of academics in phonetics to whom it would be straightforward. But more generally, using a narrow transcription has its own problems. IPA is actually quite fluid at the most detailed level. For example, consider the distinction in Italian between the endings of ottoni and ogni. The "gn" makes a quite distinctive palatalised n; I have considerable experience of trying to help Japanese speakers sing in Italian, and nobody yet has been able to get ogni right. But if you look at the IPA help pages, you will see that allegedly Japanese 鬼 (oni) is pronounced /oɲi/, the same as Italian ogni (approximating the 'o' and 'i'). But it simply isn't; so this is misleading. I think that in practice /ɲ/ might mean that someone appropriately qualified has determined that the "n" is more palatalised than you would expect, not that on an absolute scale it matches use of the symbol elsewhere.

Imaginatorium (talk) 04:23, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

I've never claimed the ACCENT dictionaries are responsible for the SEGMENTAL transcriptions. Like where did you even get this idea? The citations are there ONLY FOR THE ACCENT, the dictionaries themselves use KATAKANA, which obviously aren't fit for purpose on the ENGLISH WIKIPEDIA. I wasn't aware of "readability" whose standard of measurement has never been obvious to me. Does it mean less diacritics? In a language like Japanese where you need to mark TONES on syllables, that's just out of the question, unless you wanted to revert back to the flagrant misuse of the IPA downstep symbol. Acute and grave accents are the only way to represent tones available in the IPA. Accent dictionaries often use some kind of overline or their own graphical convention which would be logistically more problematic than tone marks (they require CSS markups that don't jibe with Wikipedia templates and are very cumbersome to implement), not to mention incompatible with the IPA. I did have to resort to overlines in the Japanese pitch accent article because in my view they're graphically more readable as contiguous lines than discrete tone marks, which helps with seeing accent contour trajectories instead of a series of fragmented pitches. The fact that you've never seen these well-established IPA marks is irrelevant, it's a you problem as they say. I really need to stress this, I don't use anything that the main IPA chart doesn't sanction, and that you problem can be easily solved by looking the damn thing up, right here on Wikipedia. Laziness is not an argument, my dude. If you want to be even minimally IPA-literate, at least get a grip of that main IPA chart.

"I previously suggested that for Japanese IPA there might be 17 people" "there must be 100s (1000s?) of academics in phonetics to whom it would be straightforward" Are we arguing with imaginary statistics now? Did you poll on this? Mazamadao (talk) 05:19, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

[oŋi] would be ogi which has nothing to do with 鬼. And even if you had meant [oɲi], you were making a case for more narrow transcription, not less. If you want to make sure that Japanese [ɲ] isn't the same as Italian [ɲ], make the Japanese transcription more narrow, as in [ɲ̟] or (Amaterasu forbid) [n̠ʲ]. Being more narrow is exactly how you make it appear less palatal-looking. And please refrain from citing your own knowledge as some kind of Italian teacher or voice coach for Japanese speakers, your "considerable experience" is not a source.Mazamadao (talk) 05:44, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, I copied the wrong symbol from the Italian table, and I will correct the above: ŋ->ɲ. Feel free to amend your response appropriately. Imaginatorium (talk) 06:05, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Are you sure you can read IPA transcriptions at all? Because if you can't, what's the point of this discussion? You do realize that even if we dumbed down the transcriptions, they're still based on the IPA and require IPA literacy right? Mazamadao (talk) 07:03, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Questioning @Imaginatorium's entire proficiency in IPA over the confusion of two very similar-looking symbols (ŋ and ɲ) is quite rude.

As for the transcriptions themselves, I don't doubt that they are accurate, but my problem lies in the actual usefulness of having such specific transcriptions. Wikipedia is to be read theoretically by anyone, so having such specific transcriptions that are only realistically useful or understandable for someone with an already deep knowledge of IPA diacritics and Japanese phonology is kind of unnecessary.

This isn't the first time you've been confronted on this either, as @Blippy1998 did on User talk:Mazamadao#IPA, where you initially responded with a similar level of rudeness. His concerns are essentially the same as mine; Wikipedia is encyclopedic and not a scientific journal, and I believe your incredibly narrow transcriptions, however precise, only serve to confuse instead of illuminate the average reader on how Japanese is pronounced. Ushitarou (talk) 11:07, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

I do not care about "rudeness" or "politeness." Frankly, I don't feel obligated to be polite to people who just argue with feelings and made up statistics, it's a waste of time. Is there any concrete guideline on this so-called "readability" I've been hearing about, or are we just pulling opinions out of our own back sides? Mazamadao (talk) 13:43, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Just so we clear, unless any of you can show some kind of consensus, or survey, or concrete citations, this is a moot point. I do not entertain opinions by laymen on subjective metrics like "readability" or "usefulness," especially on subjects they clearly have little knowledge about. If you insist on being intellectually dishonest, don't demand pleasantries from me. Mazamadao (talk) 13:53, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games § Help with sourcing for important article

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games § Help with sourcing for important article, which is within the scope of this WikiProject. Specifically, the discussion is regarding Jun Maeda's cancer and improving the quality of his article for ITN when he passes. Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 17:45, 30 October 2026 (UTC) Gommeh ^{(talk 🎮 sign)} 17:45, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

"Japanese rearmament" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Japanese rearmament has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 November 7 § Japanese rearmament until a consensus is reached. Thepharoah17 (talk) 20:50, 7 November 2026 (UTC)

"Walt Disney Japan" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Walt Disney Japan has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 November 7 § Walt Disney Japan until a consensus is reached. Thepharoah17 (talk) 20:56, 7 November 2026 (UTC)

"Weapons of Japan" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Weapons of Japan has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 November 7 § Weapons of Japan until a consensus is reached. Thepharoah17 (talk) 21:37, 7 November 2026 (UTC)

International Space Station has an RfC

International Space Station has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Jabba550 Message me ✉ 11:37, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

"Yu-ri" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Yu-ri has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 November 7 § Yu-ri until a consensus is reached. Input from those familiar with the Japanese language and Japanese personal names/naming conventions would be particularly appreciated! – Scyrme (talk/solidarity) 14:27, 9 November 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:List of Ranma ½ episodes § Requested move 2 November 2026

An editor has requested that List of Ranma ½ episodes be moved to Ranma ½ (1989 TV series), which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. Jacksonvil (talk|contribs) 08:31, 10 November 2026 (UTC)
(Notification provided by Move+)

Requested move at Talk:Naikaku Sōri Daijin Kantei § Requested move 10 November 2026

An editor has requested that Naikaku Sōri Daijin Kantei be moved to Prime Minister's Office (Japan), which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. Warm Regards, Miminity (Talk?) (me contribs) 13:08, 10 November 2026 (UTC)
(Notification provided by Move+)