Ebisu: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
Evidence dossier 136 — Ebisu. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Ebisu
- Original script: 恵比寿
- Pantheon: Japanese
- Convention: Hepburn with macrons — ō and ū marked, never collapsed to o/u or rewritten ou
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 136 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 恵比寿, on the evidence Kojiki (Hiruko episode; the land-transfer and Kotoshironushi) and Nihon Shoki (the land-transfer narrative) set down. On the evidence, it means "The foreigner, straggler". The canonical transliteration is Ebisu.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form ebisu differs from the canonical Ebisu only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Ebisu is a cultic and commercial figure rather than an excavated one; his material record is the vast folk-art corpus of the Edo and Meiji periods. Votive tablets (ema) from Osaka and the fishing ports of the Inland Sea show the rod, the bream, and the tall court cap; woodblock New Year prints (nishiki-e) fixed his smiling face in the national imagination. The Tōka Ebisu festival at Imamiya Ebisu Shrine preserves the full apparatus of merchant devotion — lucky straw, fuku-musume, gold-leaf charms — as a living tradition centuries deep. The Kojiki's Hiruko narrative has no archaeological correlate; the god's 'evidence' is the continuing rite itself, performed each January in the lanes where the merchants still set out their first scales of the year.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Ebisu is everywhere in Japanese commercial life: shop signs, menus, bank logos, New Year prints, and the great January crush at Osaka's Imamiya Ebisu and Kobe's Nishinomiya shrines. The Yebisu Beer brand (Sapporo, launched 1890) took both its name and its logo from the god, making his face one of the most reproduced in modern Japan.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: Hepburn with macrons — ō and ū marked, never collapsed to o/u or rewritten ou. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Ebisu: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form ebisu is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /ebisu/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Kojiki (Hiruko episode; the land-transfer and Kotoshironushi), Nihon Shoki (the land-transfer narrative), Bocking, A Popular Dictionary of Shinto, s.v. Ebisu.
The Register Continues
The register holds 548 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Eachuisge (read it) · next entry: Ecne (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.