Japanese Place Name Variants

Japanese place names can have various variants because of the existence of various romanization systems, as well as “hybrid” variants that include a mixture of different systems in the same place name. CJKI’s Database of Japanese Place Name Variants (JPV) is comprehensive. For example, the city 安城市 (あんじょうし) can have about 120 variants, such as Anjō, Anjou, Anjo, and Anjyo.

It covers not only place names but also town sections and smaller subdivisions such as 足立区 and 厚沢部町. Each entry includes various attributes such as hiragana readings and a large number of romanized variants. Place name variants data is especially useful in English-Japanese machine translation since the original English text can contain many unpredictable variants.