On Tajikarao: a letter to a colleague
A letter to a colleague, 31 July 2026 — on the name Tajikarao, and on the forms that keep failing it.
Your note said, roughly: surely the marks are a nicety. Permit me to use Tajikarao to show they are not.
First, the attestation. The name is attested as 手力男神, as Kojiki (Ama-no-Iwato episode) and Nihon Shoki (parallel account) record. On the evidence, it means "Strong hand man". The canonical transliteration is Tajikarao.
Say it aloud as the sources heard it: 'TAH-jee-kah-rah-oh' — the 'j' is soft, and the 'r' is a light tap. 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 tajikarao differs from the canonical Tajikarao 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. Tajikarao is a specialist deity: he does one thing, but that one thing is essential. He balances the cleverness of Uzume with brute strength, showing that cosmic restoration requires both persuasion and power.
And it never stopped working. Tajikarao is remembered primarily through the Amaterasu cave myth, one of Japan's most retold stories. He appears in art, drama, and popular media as the strongman who saved the world.
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
Tajikarao is the canonical form: attested, checkable, and enforced across the temple, the lexicon, the cards, the APIs, and this register. The plain form tajikarao 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 Tajikarao stands at /tajikarao/.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 3 cited sources — Kojiki (Ama-no-Iwato episode), Nihon Shoki (parallel account), Philippi, Kojiki.
The Register Continues
This is one of 437 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: Tàishàng (read it) · next entry: Takachiho (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.