Talk:Himeji Castle

Name: 'Castle' or '-jo'?

This is the first article on a Japanese castle so I'm placing this note about Japanese castles here.

Should we use the Japanese morpheme -jou (城) for 'castle' in titles, e.g. Himeji-jo? In Japan, English speakers very often seem to use this in preference to Whatever Castle,as do many Japanese when speaking English. However, there are more Google links to 'Osaka Castle' than 'Osaka-jo'. Any thoughts? John Stephenson 05:30, 12 March 2008 (CDT)

Hmmm. I was originally going to go with "Castle", but if I apply the thinking here, maybe it should be "-jo". (Acutually, it's "-jō", isn't it - or is my memory going?) I certainly don't want to decide this on the basis of 'what's more popular' (see the reasoning on that page). However, now that I think about it, I don't see any harm (in the sense of 'source of debate') in going with "Castle". And of course it is an English encyclopaedia (well, this one is!), and "-jo" isn't a common 'loan word' (like 'samurai' or 'shogun'), so I guess I'd actually say "no". And whatever we do, we will of course have redirects from the other, and mention both in the first sentence. (Wikipedia's scheme for doing Japanese things works quite well, I think - they have the kanji and Romaji in brackets right in the first sentence.) J. Noel Chiappa 11:24, 12 March 2008 (CDT)