Sources

This page exists because our articles carry no bylines. If you cannot judge us by who we are, you need to be able to judge us by how we work. This is that, in full.

We do not quote existing English translations

Not D.T. Suzuki on Zen, not W.S. Wilson on Hagakure, not any of the standard renderings. Those translations are themselves interpretations, made for a Western readership at a particular moment. Quoting them would reproduce the image of Japan the West already built, and present it to you as Japan.

Instead we show the Japanese original, and put our own English beside it, marked (our rendering). You can see exactly what we translated and how. If our English is doing work the original does not support, the original is right there for you to check.

Every quotation is locatable

A primary text is cited with its title and the specific volume or chapter, and a link to a Japanese archive where the text can be read. If we cannot point you to the passage, we do not quote it. Many classical works exist online only as page images and cannot be searched — where that is the case, we describe the source rather than putting words in quotation marks.

The three kinds of article

• Explained — starts from something you experienced, and answers from sources.
• Reading — an interpretation of a work or a phenomenon, argued by the editors. Other readings are possible; this one is ours.
• Second Look — a claim about Japan that circulates widely, examined from the inside. We examine claims, not people: no individual post is quoted, named or embedded.

Interpretation is free. Facts are not.

The distinction runs through everything here. In a Reading you may disagree with our interpretation and be right to. But every factual statement — a date, a policy, a number, what a text says — is verified against a source before publication, in all three formats, to the same standard.

Where our Japanese sources come from

• National Diet Library Digital Collections — classical and modern texts
• Japanese Text Initiative and comparable full-text archives — classical literature
• e-Gov — current law and regulation
• e-Stat and ministry white papers — official statistics
• MEXT curriculum guidelines and surveys — education
• Agency for Cultural Affairs, Religious Yearbook — religion statistics