The canonical register: Toyotama
Evidence dossier 496 — Toyotama. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Toyotama
- Original script: 豊玉毘売命
- Pantheon: Japanese
- Convention: Hepburn with macrons — ō and ū marked, never collapsed to o/u or rewritten ou
- False forms on record: 0
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 496 of 548
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 豊玉毘売命, as Kojiki, Hikohohodemi-no-mikoto and Toyotama-hime cycle; trans. Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Nihon Shoki (Nihongi), Age of the Gods volumes, parallel variants; trans. W. G. Aston (1896) record. On the evidence, it means "Abundant jewel". The canonical transliteration is Toyotama.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form toyotama differs from the canonical Toyotama 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.
Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Toyotama has no excavated sanctuary and no inscription names her; her witnesses are books. The Kojiki was compiled in 712 and the Nihon Shoki in 720, and the Kojiki's oldest complete manuscript, the Shinpukuji-bon of 1371–72, still transmits the Hoori narrative. The myth's geography, however, is walked rather than read: the Miyazaki coast — Aoshima's tide-washed island shrine, the Cape Kasasa lookout, the Horikiri pass — preserves the story as local topography. Inland, at Kashihara in Nara prefecture, Kashihara Jingū marks the site of Jimmu's palace and throne, the terrestrial terminus of the sea-borne genealogy she began. Her material record, in short, is the map of Japan's founding geography.
Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Toyotama's legacy is dynastic before it is cultic: every emperor of Japan descends from her through Jimmu, so her name is woven into the state's founding genealogy. Her landscape is the Hyūga coast of Miyazaki — Aoshima, reached at low tide by its own sandbar, keeps the legend of the birth-hut, and Cape Kasasa and the Horikiri pass are pointed out as the myth's stations.
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.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Toyotama: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form toyotama is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /toyotama/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 3 cited sources — Kojiki, Hikohohodemi-no-mikoto and Toyotama-hime cycle; trans. Donald L. Philippi, Kojiki (Princeton University Press, 1969), Nihon Shoki (Nihongi), Age of the Gods volumes, parallel variants; trans. W. G. Aston (1896), Aoki, Michiko Yamaguchi, Ancient Myths and Early History of Japan (Garland, 1974).
The Register Continues
The register holds 548 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Tōnatiuh (read it) · next entry: Trengtreng (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.