Talk:Kitahara Hakushū

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An entry from Kitahara Hakushū appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on January 5, 2007.

[edit] Given name versus family name

A few weeks ago I edited the article to replace all instances of the subject's given name "Kitahara" with his family name "Hakushū", in line with the Manual of Style. Subsequently, User:MChew added this hidden comment to the article:

Kitahara is the family name, Hakushū is the given name; when referring to authors by their pen-name in Japanese, it is common practice to refer to them by the given name

I can't find any trace of this practice in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (biographies)#Subsequent_uses_of_names or in Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles), and have had no response to an enquiry on MChew's talk page. I also note with increasing confusion that in Morita Sōhei, written by User:MChew himself and where (to my eyes) an identical situation exists, he has chosen to use the family name throughout.

Name order is already confusing enough in Japanese biographical articles without throwing away the general biographical rule of referring to the subject by their family name. Even if it is accepted practise elsewhere, it doesn't seem to be so on Wikipedia, so I'm moving the hidden comment out of the article and here into the talk page to avoid confusing other editors. Ben Ram 10:01, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Ben Ram is correct in that this is not part of WP:MOS, nor WP-MOS-JA, and is also correct in that there is no consistency in usage, even amongst the Japanese. In the case of many Japanese poets, including Kitahara Hakushū, use of the first name of the pen-name is predominant, possibly a carry-over traditional practice of using a poetic single-name haigo (haiku pen-names); the practice is less common with prose writers. The Japanese language article on Kitahara Hakushū refers to him as Hakushū throughout the article, as does almost all other Japanese language sources. The same can be said of writers such as Kunikida Doppo, Izumi Kyoka, etc, who are almost invariably referred to as Doppo and Kyoka by the Japanese (in Japanese). On the other hand, other authors with well-known pen-names, such as Mishima Yukio (to give but one example) is invariably referred to as Mishima, and not Yukio in Japanese language sources. I would like to note that I did not say that that use of Kitahara in the article was incorrect, nor did I "throw away the general biographical rule" (which was why the comment was a hidden one); I specifically wrote when referring to authors by their pen-name in Japanese. In other words, the comment was intended only as guidance on common usage in the Japanese language and Japanese sources, and not a comment on Wikipedia MOS.--MChew 16:29, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I see - I was uncertain whether it was intended as a note on usage or as an instruction for editors. Perhaps this should be mentioned in the article itself - after all, information on the specifics of Japanese usage, when particularly relevant to the subject of an article, could be useful to readers, not just editors. Finding a suitable English-language citation might be a problem, though. Ben Ram 13:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)