The Northern and Southern Courts period (also called the Nanboku-Chō period) was a brief but tumultuous era that saw great changes throughout Japanese society.

Japanese Women’s Names: A Historical Perspective

Tsunoda Bunʾei’s book Japanese Women’s Names: A Historical Perspective1 is a priceless resource, but it’s almost impossible to get in the United States. Since there is almost nothing else in English about historical Japanese women’s names, I have decided to translate portions of the chapter about the Northern and Southern Courts period.

This is a machine translation. (I wish my Japanese was good enough to read scholarly writing, but it’s not.) I used my previous attempts to translate the book by hand, plus my knowledge of the subject, to correct Google Translate’s output. I also added translator’s notes and changed the lists of names into tables with added information for non-Japanese speakers. Get more details on the translation >

Table of Contents

How I Translated the Book

In progress.

To translate, I scanned my copy of the book, ran Adobe Acrobat’s OCR on the resulting PDFs, then copied the OCR text into Google Translate, correcting OCR mistakes by hand. I tweaked the results to see how different attempts at translation changed the text, then chose what seemed to be the most accurate translation, using my earlier attempts at traditional translation plus my knowledge of the subject to inform my decision. Then I lightly edited the text to smooth out the grammar. I also inserted the Japanese spelling of names into the text, confirmed or corrected the pronunciation of names, and added translator’s notes as necessary.

The greatest changes were to the lists of names. I moved these into tables, with the English transliteration, meaning, and any translator’s notes.

What was omitted:

  • All figures
  • All footnotes
  • Extra explanatory text in lists, when not necessary to understand the names. I noted all locations where information was omitted.
  1. Tsunoda Bunʾei (角田 文衛). Japanese Women’s Names: A Historical Perspective (Nihon no joseimei: rekishiteki tenbo | 日本の女性名 : 歴史的展望). Rekishi shinsho. Nihon shi; 30, 42-43. 1980. ↩︎