The register rules: Honshū

The internet spells Honshū more ways than one, and only one of them is the name the sources wrote. This is the register's ruling — canonical, fallback, contested, and false, each in its proper place.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Honshū
• Original script: 本州
• 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. 113 of 287

The Canonical Form

The name is attested as 本州, as Kojiki and Nihon Shoki preserve it. On the evidence, it means "'Main island' (本州)". The canonical transliteration is Honshū.

Every mark is evidence, and every piece of evidence is checkable:

• u → ū — Macron marks the long vowel: the vowel length, as the sources give it.

Where the Flattened Form Stands

The plain form honshu 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: honshu 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.

The Register of False Forms

False form 1: Honshu

Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself.

Violation: every substitution here (ū→u) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.

False form 2: Honshú

Origin: the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums.

Violation: a macron marks length; an acute marks tone — different facts.

The Contested Forms

No alternate form of this name carries documented scholarly support in the lexicon's record. The convention here — Hepburn with macrons — ō and ū marked, never collapsed to o/u or rewritten ou — produces exactly one defensible transliteration: Honshū. Forms that differ from it are not contested; they are simply wrong.

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.

What the Address Bar Allows

IDNA 2008 permits the letters these restorations use — macrons, acutes, underdots, thorn, ogonek, the lot — and the DNS carries them as punycode (`xn--` labels). Two honest constraints remain. First, registrar inventory: the protocol permits a character; the registrar's stock decides whether the exact domain can be bought today. Second, combined marks: forms like Apṓllōn (acute stacked on a macron) are philologically ideal yet effectively untypeable on phones and unsupported across much of the registration system.

That is why the rulebook keeps a fallback hierarchy — full restoration first, then the circumflex when the source carries one, then the macron-only academic standard, then an attested variant, and only as a last resort the plain ASCII form. Every step down the ladder is still defensible; nothing on the ladder is a wrong mark. A fallback is a choice among attested forms. A false form is not on the ladder at all.

Where the Name Stood First

Sannai-Maruyama near Aomori preserves a Jōmon city of 5,500 years ago — great cedar pillars, longhouses, and chestnut stores that rewrote the era's reputation from "primitive" to prosperous. The Yayoi's moated villages and the keyhole-shaped kofun tombs (Daisenryō in Ōsaka is among the largest tombs on earth by area) trace the state's rise. Nara's Tōdai-ji holds the world's largest bronze Buddha in the world's largest wooden building; Ise's shikinen sengū — the twenty-year rebuilding — is living archaeology, a Bronze Age rite performed on schedule into the present. The temple on the web is the newest of these addresses — the first one that fits in a pocket.

The Verdict

The register rules for Honshū, and the ruling is checkable: every mark sourced, every violation stated, every borderline form given its honest standing. honshu is the sanctioned fallback for systems without marks — a vehicle, never the scholarly primary. Anything else in circulation has its origin and its failure recorded above. That is the whole of the law on this name — and the temple at /sites/honshu/ enforces it.

The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Honshu first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: u → ū; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Kojiki, Nihon Shoki, Shinto.

The Register Continues

Entry 113 of 287 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.

Continue the register — previous entry: Hokkaidō (read it) · next entry: Ḥr (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.