The canonical register: Kagutsuchi
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Kagutsuchi, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Kagutsuchi to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as 迦具土, in the attestation Kojiki (birth and death of Kagutsuchi) and Nihon Shoki (parallel account) give us. On the evidence, it means "The burning force". The canonical transliteration is Kagutsuchi.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'KAH-goo-tsoo-chee' — the 'tsu' is crisp, and the final 'chi' is like 'chee'. 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 kagutsuchi differs from the canonical Kagutsuchi 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.
One more thing, because it always surprises: the name did not stay home. Kagutsuchi parallels fire gods in many traditions, but his role as the cause of the creator goddess's death is distinctive. In later Shinto and folk belief, he overlaps with hearth deities and volcanic kami.
And it never stopped working. Kagutsuchi appears in popular media as a volcanic or destructive deity, and his name is invoked in discussions of Japanese volcanism and geothermal energy. The ritual care of fire — in the hearth, the forge, and the volcano — preserves his ancient significance.
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
Kagutsuchi is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form kagutsuchi shares that standing — the two are the same name in every system. 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 Kagutsuchi stands at /kagutsuchi/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 3 cited sources — Kojiki (birth and death of Kagutsuchi), Nihon Shoki (parallel account), Philippi, Kojiki.
The Register Continues
Entry 206 of 437 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: Kꜣ (read it) · next entry: Kai (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.