Romanising names

[Aaron Gerow]

Yes, the trend is towards returning to Japanese name order. This is 
definitely the case with scholarship, especially in Japan studies. But 
it is also the case with officialdom in Japan. I taught at a Japanese 
national university and actually helped design their English home page. 
There was apparently a directive from the Ministry of Education 
encouraging universities to start using Japanese name order, so on the 
English home page we rendered all names in Japanese name order. This 
practice is spreading, but it will obviously cause a lot of confusion 
as things change.
 
> On a related note, it seems to be increasingly popular to use 
> diacritics to indicate vowel length with Japanese words. Most sources 
> us the macron (the dash over the letter), while certain prominent ones 
> use a circumflex. Since the circumflex (to the best of my 
> knowledge) isn't used in European languages to indicate length, is 
> this accurate? Any help would be appreciated!

The macron is the official way of rendering long sounds in romanizing 
Japanese. To my knowledge, the circumflex is only used because not all 
fonts or media, especially the internet, can handle macrons. It is thus 
a practical substitute which simply means "this should be a macron but 
we don't have one to use."

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner

Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Yale University

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