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Note on Romanised Japanese
Representing Japanese names in English language text is always difficult. In Japanese one’s family name comes first, followed by one’s given name. However, this presents problems when rendered into Romanised Japanese because some readers who are not familiar with Japanese naming conventions may become confused as to which part of the name is the family name. This is an important issue when people wish to use names in citations and references. Thus, while acknowledging that changing the order of names might appear disrespectful, simply to avoid confusion and to facilitate correct citation and referencing, we have rendered all names into the English format, with given names preceding family names.
Diacritics also present problems in Romanised Japanese and we have found there is no single method for representing the pronunciation of Japanese words in Roman script that can be followed in all cases. So, we have adopted the following convention which we hope is a good compromise between rigour and ease of understanding for those not familiar with the Japanese language. We have avoided using diacritics with