Jizō — the one true spelling, and the forms that fail it
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Jizō, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Jizō to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as 地蔵, in the attestation Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra and Faure, The Power of Denial give us. On the evidence, it means "Earth treasury". The canonical transliteration is Jizō.
And the marks themselves: o → ō (Long vowel). Remove any one of them and you have not simplified the name — you have told a small lie about it, and the whole discipline is the refusal of such lies.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'JEE-zoh' — the first syllable is like 'jee', the second is a long, drawn 'zoh'. The marks are what carry that sound to a reader who has never heard it spoken.
On the plain form — and I want to be precise, because you pushed on this. The plain form jizo 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: jizo may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. Every mark it drops — o → ō — is a fact the sources recorded. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Now to the forms that provoked your letter. As for Jizo: it comes from the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself, and it fails because every substitution here (ō→o) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read As for Jizô: it comes from the near-miss — a form that looks right at a glance and circulates on wikis and forums, and it fails because a macron (length) is not a circumflex (quality/tone) — they answer different questions
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Kṣitigarbha entered China from India and absorbed functions of local earth gods and tomb guardians. In Japan he merged with the kami of roads and boundaries (Sae no Kami / Dōsojin) and with popular protectors of children.
And it never stopped working. Jizō is everywhere in Japan: thousands of stone statues line mountain paths, village boundaries, and temple precincts. The practice of mizuko kuyō—memorial rites for foetal and infant deaths—centres on him, making him a focus of modern debates about abortion, grief, and maternal responsibility.
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.
Where Protocol Meets Practice
The technical answer is simple: the canonical marks are legal IDNA 2008 characters, encoded as punycode under `xn--`. The practical answer is messier: legal does not mean stocked (registrar inventory is partial), and stocked does not mean typeable (stacked diacritics defeat mobile keyboards).
So the register's rule is a hierarchy of attested forms — full restoration, circumflex, macron-only, attested variant, and finally plain ASCII for the systems that cannot carry marks. Every rung is defensible because every rung is attested. The forms this register rules against are not rungs; they are errors, and errors do not get rungs.
Write back when you have checked the sources; they are better company than I am.
— The Register
The Verdict
Jizō is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form jizo is sanctioned as the fallback vehicle and nothing more. The false forms above are documented so that no reader has to take the temple's word on faith — the violations are stated, the sources are named, and the register stands open to challenge on every line.
The temple of Jizō stands at /sites/jizo/.
The docket for this ruling: 2 false forms ruled against, Jizo first on the docket; 1 preserved mark verified: o → ō; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 5 cited sources — Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva Sutra, Faure, The Power of Denial, Reader and Tanabe, Practically Religious.
The Register Continues
This is one of 287 entries in the Canonical Register — the authoritative reference for every flagship temple. The temple's founding dispatch tells the name's story; its Restoration File details the marks; its Resonance File reads the archetype into the industries. The blog index holds the whole archive, and the Rulebook states the convention this register enforces.
Continue the register — previous entry: Iūpiter (read it) · next entry: Jǫrmungandr (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.