Scholarly Name Reference
also written Tokyo
Eastern capital
Scholarly reference for Tōkyō
東京
The name in its original Japanese characters form. 東京 carries the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the source tradition.
TOKYO
Stripped of its identity, the name was reduced to plain Latin letters. The original orthography — stress, length, breathing — was erased by systems that only understand A-Z.
Tōkyō
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
tōkyō.com → xn--tky-qxac.com
The non-ASCII characters in Tōkyō are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Tōkyō. This domain is currently registered by another party.
toh-kyoh · /toː.kʲoː/
Derived from restored orthography (standard Japanese).
How tokyo becomes Tōkyō
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | t | → | T | Same | Same |
| 02 | o | → | ō | Length | Macron: long vowel |
| 03 | k | → | k | Same | Same |
| 04 | y | → | y | Same | Same |
| 05 | o | → | ō | Length | Macron: long vowel |
Why Tōkyō is classified as Tier-1
The Japanese restoration 東京 preserves at least one distinctive feature its ASCII form loses — a diacritic or a distinctive letter that marks the original phonology. This makes it a single-tier Tier-1 name.
See how Tōkyō behaves in the PUNICODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
tokyo
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Tōkyō