The Authentic Orthography
Capital, Kanto Region · Eastern capital
Why tōkyō.com is the correct form
東京
The name in its original Japanese form. A name that carries the full phonetic weight of its source tradition.
TOKYO
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.
Tōkyō
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII destroyed. This is philological accuracy — not decoration. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
tōkyō.com → xn--tky-qxac.com
The non-ASCII characters in Tōkyō are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Tōkyō.
How tokyo becomes Tōkyō
| Step | ASCII | Unicode | Type | Scholarly Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | t | → | T | Same | Same |
| 02 | o | → | ō | Length | Macron: long vowel |
| 03 | k | → | k | Same | Same |
| 04 | y | → | y | Same | Same |
| 05 | o | → | ō | Length | Macron: long vowel |
Why Tōkyō is classified as Tier-1 Macron-Preserving
The Japanese original 東京 contains both stress AND at least one long vowel. However, there is only one historically valid Unicode restoration. The ASCII fallback is modern English, not ancient canonical. This is the full scholarly orthography — a single-tier Tier-1 name.
See how Tōkyō behaves in the PUNYCODEX Type Tool — with predictive autocomplete, character-by-character breakdown, and scholarly constraint validation.
tokyo
→
Tōkyō