Style / Language / Japanese
| Status: This is an official style guideline. |
Capitalization
For names and titles originating in Japan, non-Japanese characters should be capitalized as intended by the artist or label.
Although the Japanese script has no capitalization, it is very common for Japanese titles to contain characters or words from other scripts. Japanese artists have a tendency to choose capitalization and punctuation for aesthetic reasons, and to be very consistent regarding case over all releases. For this reason, words in the Latin script on a Japanese release should be in the same case as on the album art if other available sources, such as official discography or record label pages, are consistent, not normalized according to English or other capitalization standards. This applies even if the whole title is in English or another non-Japanese language, as long as it is consistently written in the non-standard way.
Transliteration into Latin Script
There are several methods to transliterate Japanese into the Latin script. If an official transliteration is available (endorsed by the artist or their record label), it should be used. For a summary of the most common transliteration method used for user-submitted transliterations on MusicBrainz, see Transliteration Standard Japanese (but note this is a guide rather than a guideline and there's no specific guideline for unofficial transliterations).
The capitalization style used on transliterated (romanized) Japanese releases is designed to resemble the title-casing style used for English releases. Although official Japanese standards differ, these guidelines reflect the most common style for romanized titles used by English-speakers on the Internet. In particular:
- The first word of a title should always have the first letter capitalized.
- Proper nouns (names) should have the first letter of each word capitalized.
- Any honourifics or suffixes to a proper noun should be in lowercase.
- Every other word should have the first letter capitalized, except:
- Particles (1-2 mora long): wa, ga, o, ni, de, e, to, mo, ka, ya, kara, made, yo, ne, etc. Particles on Wikipedia
- Any words written using Latin characters in the original title should maintain the same capitalization as originally used.