Evidence dossier: Fūjin

Evidence dossier 086 — Fūjin. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Fūjin
• Original script: 風神
• Pantheon: Japanese
• Convention: Hepburn with macrons — ō and ū marked, never collapsed to o/u or rewritten ou
• False forms on record: 2
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 86 of 287

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 風神, as Kojiki (birth of the wind kami Shinatsuhiko in the divine age) and Nihon Shoki (age of the gods and wind kami) preserve it. On the evidence, it means "Wind god". The canonical transliteration is Fūjin.

Exhibit 2 — the preserved marks. u → ū (Long vowel). Each is verifiable against the sources named in the attestation.

Exhibit 3 — the flattened form. The plain form fujin is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.

What the fallback status forbids is promotion: fujin may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — u → ū — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.

Exhibit 4 — struck from the record: Fujin. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ū→u) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

Exhibit 5 — struck from the record: Fújin. Origin: the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums. Grounds: a macron marks length; an acute marks tone — different facts.

Exhibit 6 — the physical record. Fūjin is best known from Japanese painting and sculpture rather than from archaeological contexts alone. The oldest surviving depictions appear in Heian- and Kamakura-period Buddhist iconography, where he serves as a guardian deity. The most famous visual testimony is the pair of folding screens by Tawaraya Sōtatsu (early 17th century), now at the Kyoto National Museum and Kenninji temple, which depict Fūjin and Raijin in gold-leaf clouds. Temple sculptures and ema (votive plaques) across Japan preserve popular representations of the wind god, while the textual record in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki anchors his mythological origins in the creation age.

Exhibit 7 — the continuing record. Fūjin remains one of Japan's most recognizable kami. The folding screens (byōbu) depicting Fūjin and Raijin by Tawaraya Sōtatsu are national treasures and icons of Japanese art.

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 Fūjin: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form fujin rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. 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 /sites/fujin/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Fujin first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: u → ū; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 7 cited sources — Kojiki (birth of the wind kami Shinatsuhiko in the divine age), Nihon Shoki (age of the gods and wind kami), Philippi, Kojiki.

The Register Continues

The register holds 287 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: Eurṓpē (read it) · next entry: Fúxī (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.