Nihonto Club

Hi Pete,

I absolutely agree with your comments. And I'm sure there are numerous cases when modern pronunciations of certain smiths' names would be totally different from what they were calling themselves. However in terms of sword research the pronunciation is an interesting but not that important detail. The point I tried to raise was that there may be (or there are should I say) multiple records for the same smiths just because of the different ways their names could be pronounced, especially in the literature which primarily uses romanized versions of smiths' names. As a general approach I'd like to avoid duplications in the smith directory (where possible).

As for Romanization in general, while it's reasonably straightforward in academic and specialist circles, it becomes a little bit more complicated for resources with international audience with different levels of familiarity with the world of Nihonto. Some balance is required between correctness and usability. And when I mention usability I mean searching and ease of typing, most of all. 90% of all search requests on Nihonto Club website are about smiths and their signatures, mostly in some romanized form. And hewre we are facing all the typical issues of Romanization:

1.Treatment of long vowels would be one of the issues. For instance depending on whether 'ō' or 'ou' or even 'o' is used, some people would not be able to find what they were looking for. When I started working on the Swordsmith Index, a decision was made to transform all the long vowels into their short forms ('o' in the case of long ō/ou) as the most search-friendly version. Even though I personally prefer 'ō' as other macrons as it doesn't deprive the meaning as short 'o' does, and doesn't produce as long and inelegant version of words as 'ou', 'uu' and others do. Not surprisingly though, neither of these conventions work well for native Japanese speakers who (due to obvious reasons) produce the widest variability of irregular (for English speakers' eyes) romanized forms which are completely out of sync with the most popular notations used in the West. I'm constantly monitoring the site usage in order to make things easier and I know for sure that there are many search requests being made which won't fetch any results due to, I wouldn't say wrong or exotic, but different romanization convention. Searches for Umetada Myoju would come as: Myoju, Myouju, Myōju, Myoujyu, Myojyu etc. The situation becomes even worse for our Russian friends as Cyrillization of Japanese is seemingly based on (or close to) Nihon-shiki convention. Modern technologies, Google search in particular, have advanced significantly in dealing with these issues, but in my opinion we are still not there overall to disregard these peculiarities.

2. Archaic pronunciations, 'ye', 'iye', suye', 'kiyo' etc. This is what Hawley used, as well as probably 50% of English-speaking researchers after him due to the wide-spread use of his 'Japanese Swordsmiths' directory. This is what I originally decided to use on this website as well. All the data coming from different sources was meticulously transformed to adhere to the chosen convention. To be honest I'm really tempted now to make a u-turn and switch to the modern form (e, ie, sue, etc) before it's too late. This isn't decided yet, mostly due to lack of free time for a reasonably big transition, but also because I'm still not completely sure about it myself. Advice of a more knowledgeable person would be helpful here. In the end, Nihonto studies deal with names and events from long time ago and archaic forms may be more appropriate. But again, there should be a balance between tradition, present state of affairs and future outlook. I'm currently reading Japanese Names and How To Read Them: A Manual for Art Collectors and Students. Hopefully it will shed some more light on the subject.
3. Variations in treatment of s/z, n/m, h/b etc. (e.g. Sukesane vs. Sukezane, Honma vs. Homma). In my opinion it's not the particular convention we choose, but, most importantly, the consistency throughout the website what makes a difference. Data quality is my primary concern when working with the Swordsmith Index and I'm trying to make sure that there is as little ambiguity as possible and that the same personal or geographical name, nengo and term appears in exactly the same form and that the approach is uniform across the resource.
This is why I thought that it would be an interesting observation that same smiths (may) appear in Hawley's a number of times just because of the difference in pronunciation (on top of traditional name changing practice). I think (please correct me if I'm wrong) that there were cases that smiths changed pronunciation of their names without changing the Kanji form, and vice versa, swapped Kanji, but leaving pronunciation intact.
Regards,
Stan