The Authentic Orthography
Smallest Main Island · Four provinces
Why shikoku.com is the correct form
四国
The name in its original Japanese form. A name that carries the full phonetic weight of its source tradition.
SHIKOKU
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.
Shikoku
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
shikoku.com → shikoku.com
The non-ASCII characters in Shikoku are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Shikoku.
How shikoku becomes Shikoku
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | s | → | S | Same | Same |
| 02 | h | → | h | Same | Same |
| 03 | i | → | i | Same | Same |
| 04 | k | → | k | Same | Same |
| 05 | o | → | o | Same | Same |
| 06 | k | → | k | Same | Same |
| 07 | u | → | u | Same | Same |
Why Shikoku is classified as Tier-2 Basic
The Japanese original 四国 contains only no distinctive phonetic features. This makes it a single-tier Tier-2 name. The Unicode restoration preserves what can be preserved — honoring the single feature that distinguishes it from plain ASCII.
See how Shikoku behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
shikoku
→
Shikoku