Scholarly reference for Tōkyō
東京
The name in its original Japanese characters form. 東京 carries the full phonetic and orthographic weight of the 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. This domain is currently registered by another party.
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 name 東京 is represented by its most canonical scholarly spelling. For non-Greek names, Tier-1 status reflects the definitive attested restoration rather than Greek-style stress/length features. This is the authoritative Unicode form — 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
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Tōkyō