Sega's Inconsistent Romanization (Feat. A Brief History On Japanese)

Okay, let's cut the shit.

​

Sega's Inconsistent Romanization
Or, How I Learned to Stop Yapping and Look at Words​

This is something I've always talked about on my social media circles for ages now, but after I surveyed just how obscure this is to people (outside of the L and R thing in that thread, if you know you know), I've decided to make a thread that jots down all the instances that this has happened. But before I make any other posts to this thread, we need all of the backstory. All of it.

So if you know anything about Japanese, you would know that the way we spell Japanese in the English language is officially called Hepburn. Let's go on a crash course. Hepburn focuses on how we read and pronounce words in written English. Japanese has five vowels, and those can be linked with a consonant. These sounds when written are called kana, much like how we call ours in English letters. A I U E O, Ma Mi Mu Me Mo, Ka Ki Ku Ke Ko, you get the idea.

There are some sounds in Japanese that do not always fit this, however. Chi and Tsu in the t- kana row, Fu in the h- kana row, and Shi in the s- kana row. To accommodate for these extra sounds, Hepburn changes them to how we would pronounce them.

You got that? Now let's talk about the elephant in the room. That's the sound that we use in Canada and the United States, as well as people who learn Japanese as a second language. But what do the Japanese use? You might've noticed that I have been staging this in a distant manner. Well, when Hepburn was introduced in the 19th century, Japan also created their own English system to accommodate and/or supplant Hepburn. That system is called the Kunrei system, itself a offshoot of the Nihon system, and this is what Japanese people mainly use to spell their speech in English.

I should add that there's a whole fascinating story on how these two systems were sitting in a strange cultural space due to the whole... horrifying mess that was turn-of-the-century Japan, but let's not get lost in the weeds here. Just know that they were going to use Hepburn, but Kunrei stuck around on the books.

Right off the bat, unless you're actually from Japan (and I know most of this forum aren't), this is where things start to feel "wrong". You start to really appreciate linguistics a lot more once you get over the initial shock. In this system, everything sticks to the consonant and vowel rule. Shis become sis, tsus become tus, and when dakuten get included in the mix, jis are now zis. Things get even messier when you deal with you'on, where normally you append kana with smaller characters to create new sounds. While Hepburn accounted for this, the small ya/yu/yos get included with the consonants in Kunrei, leading to stuff like syo, tya, zyu, et cetera... It's like talking without idioms. If you're not used to it, begins to feel strange after a while.

Up until quite recently (it was earlier this year, if you're curious about that sort of thing), Kunrei was what was taught to Japanese kids for generations. Typically, when romaji are introduced to kids in the classroom, Kunrei and Hepburn are both included but with little context as to why there's two systems. While to us they're two different spellings, to Japanese speakers they simply just represent the same sounds and are interchangeable when writing.

After the mid-1940s following World War II, the United States temporarily watched over Japan like a sheepdog. It was there that a wider world of (reluctant) cultural exchange opened up. For the United States, the memory of the war left a bittersweet taste on the public's mouths for decades, with many reluctant to accept goods and culture from the country. In popular culture, the image of Japan was often the same image two to three generations ago. Importing goods from Japan came with this mild hesitancy, with toys often thought to be "cheap" and some filmmakers feeling uncomfortable when admitting that they took inspiration from Japanese cinema.

But for Japan, there was less hesitancy when it came to the invitation of new ideas. There was still some reluctance, but the most apparent effect of this exchange was the wider proliferation of English as a language. I have a hard time explaining it, but basically for the younger generation it became "cool" to use English words and sentences in any way possible, much like how some of us use French phrases to describe something i.e. je ne sais quoi or déjà vu. Whether it'd be using English loanwords to describe something that doesn't quite exist in Japanese, or making new English words and wearing clothes that often have English text on it.

Spoiler: Brief Tangent

(As a tangent, while Japan found itself in a economic bubble in the late 20th century, this was actually why Nintendo had to be careful when exporting their games to the United States, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System. Even in the 1980s, Japanese products still had an unspoken aura of caution: at best, it was still a guilty pleasure, and at worst you had people smashing up cars because it came from a Japanese manufacturer and the American cars weren't selling well. It got really ugly, and I mean really ugly.)

Nearly all mass media in Japan starting c. 1950s have used English and Japanese together. It's basically the norm; heck, even Sonic the Hedgehog uses both at times. While the English lexicon have become a part of Japanese culture (to the point where it's weird for a game to have only Japanese), Romaji is still shaky in a literary sense. For most people, it's very common to use the Kunrei system. At times, both Kunrei and Hepburn were used interchangeably either in the same sentence or the same word. This isn't really out of the ordinary, heck, I often flipflop between the Canadian way of writing my words and the American way. Most Japanese people don't know that there is a meaningful difference between the two systems, other than it being a different interchangeable way to spell Japanese in English.

But to an average English reader, some of the ways Japanese gets spelled might seem off, missing letters and all, and without further context you might be tempted to scullydad it off as "just being a typo". But, well, no, that's actually how the system works. We don't say bologna, we say baloney. Sometimes, a tsu is a tu.

You might actually be familiar with a instance of this already! If you know anything about kaizo games, you might already be familiar with the Japanese Windows game Shobon no Action. It's this really hard parody of Super Mario Bros. that's specifically designed to piss you off. But before you pull up Google, let me assuage you ahead of time by saying no, you're not being gaslit, you did know it as Syobon Action. Nearly everything on YouTube before 2023 calls it that (looks like MagicMush didn't get the memo), so why the name change?

Long story short, that's how Chiki (or Tiki, if you prefer) spelled it in his blog. Like most Japanese citizens, he was taught Kunrei as his primary system for romaji and that's how he types it with his IME. Indeed, it was "Syobon no Action", but in his blog's URLs he shortened it as "syobon_action_description", and anyone not fully familiar with Japanese but blindly poking his website in 2009 to download the game would assume the game's English title was Syobon Action and that it's pronounced "So yo bonn action". It's... technically correct, but no, it's just "Shobon no Action" and this curious instance of Kunrei being used is probably the more popular instance in the current Internet consciousness.

You know what's also a part of Japanese mass media? Sega. How do they handle English? Yes.

While not unique to the company, Sega's credits have a particular predilection of carsmashing Hepburn and Kunrei together whenever a piece of text or the credits have to use Romaji. Sometimes it can be mistaken as a typo as I mentioned earlier, but other times it might give you pause if you speak English primarily as your main language and know about Japanese.

This isn't just your regular mistransliteration i.e. Harry and Hurry, Bas and Bus, Mirror and Miller, this is when names have the given name written in Kunrei, while the family name's written in Hepburn. Stuff like that. This might be the choice of the developers and how they personally write their names, but from experience I've seen given names written with you'on use Kunrei while family names that use differing consonants (i.e. Chi or Tsu) are written in Hepburn.

Sometimes they just use Kunrei, other times it's entirely Hepburn, and sometimes, they use both at once which might make you think there's some new combination of kana you're not familiar of in your studies. But no, they really just mishmashed two systems together. A part of this comes from force of habit; the Wapuro system for keyboard IMEs allows you to use Kunrei and Hepburn interchangeably, and although I haven't done research on this front yet, it seems Wapuro was a staple among early Japanese computers. Many of these games were developed using these kinds of computers, so it's easy to see that they would overlap. (It might also explain why "key" was often a synonym of "button", i.e. Push Start Key).

While not strictly related to Sega, there's some oldschool games that write out their Japanese in romaji and while I can't think of a specific example, they also flipflop between both Kunrei and Hepburn. I think it's both interesting and admittedly dizzying at the same time, because you have to store a mental dictionary of which sound they're trying to write out and you have to read between the lines on what this actually says or not.

For fun, this thread aims to list any instance of Sega's inconsistent romanization, or when they use Kunrei. As a facet of Japanese itself, other developers also use Kunrei, and I aim to make note of those too, but otherwise it's just Sega and their habit of mozidouri syukudai o konashite iru. Sorry, force of habit.

Normally this is where I end my post, and I wish I could provide some further reading to you, but... uh, I have a confession to make; there isn't really any? At least not in the format us zoomers like to read in. This is the kind of stuff where unless you're REALLY studying Japanese or if you're actually in Japan, you wouldn't really know about it and it wouldn't be useful for casual stuff.

In fact, I only came across this by sheer accident while going off the beaten path. I was looking up something about Cardcaptor Sakura (it's this oldschool anime about a girl and capturing magical things in cards while wearing costumes) and one of the guys in it had his name spelled weirdly. I checked Wikipedia and next that I know I'm reading this old fan website's blurb about how this character has the same pronunciation but differing spellings. And now I got bit by the bug. Once I noticed it I could not unsee it... it's like getting bit by a hydrophobic dog and next that you know you start seeing special things and you must spread the goods everywhere.
Edit: Some of the replies here provided very good insight in regards to how Romaji is used, so I recommend checking those out too. I also changed some of the paragraphs here to reflect the new information that I learnt after I initially wrote this.

Unlike my other threads, it's hard to say if people can provide examples. Developing a eye for this kind of stuff is actually a bit hard, considering the relative obscurity of Kunrei in the West. Some things such as QuackShot's Japanese title using "Guruzia" can hide in plain sight unless you cross reference a dictionary and your romaji system of choice. If you can send other examples of these curiosities, be my guest!

 

First example that comes to mind is Altered Beast... this is the Genesis version, but the Arcade version has a secret message that also makes use of Kunrei-Hepburn mixing (specifically, Shinobi and tukutta)

 

Oh, do tell! This is something that is often documented rather passively on Wikipedia, and I fear there could be errors as for some points (particularly the 1950s point, I knew this because some 50s medical films that I knew of were bilingual, but it could go earlier or later). I had to go off observations instead of documentation while I was writing this (which can be a big no-no in some contexts), and while performing sanity checks I had trouble trying to find information on a specific concept that I read somewhere, but got buried in one page or another. It's very possible that I'm missing some vital context that's present in other documents that I couldn't find yet.

Admittedly, I did write that under the assumption that one or two people would be responsible for transcribing names onto a game's credits. I believe that could be a Hepburn thing? It's buried inside a sentence in another page, but from what I've found, Kunrei traditionally uses the circumflex for that purpose i.e. syônen. That's one gap in my knowledge that I've been able to infer thanks to words such as "wolf" (ohkami/ookami), but it appears that Oh comes from the choh-onpu in his family name's first kanji and how they type it on a keyboard (see next point). From what I can gather, it's on and off if in English someone decides to discard the choh-onpu's macron in their name or if they want to keep it. This Wikipedia disambiguation article demonstrates as such.

That's a really good point too, and that's also one thing I've been able to infer from how I've been able to use my Japanese IME. While I believe some developers might have used thumb-shift keyboards (I have no real way of proving this and no one that I know of really uses thumb-shift), a common way to type has been the Wapuro method (a cursory search shows that this was introduced on IBM PC and NEC PC-88 machines). On my Windows IME, it does accept both Kunrei and Hepburn. Kunrei is faster to type on using Wapuro, while Hepburn can be used in the same sentence. The underlying kana still is the same, so that might play a factor on why some messages and credits use both systems.

While it isn't Sega adjacent, Bubble Bobble for the Game Boy might be of important reference. Buried inside the game's ROM are several messages which both use Kunrei and Hepburn. This might be a indication that whoever wrote the messages was using Wapuro, because it doesn't use Kunrei exclusively and seems to use it to save on typing time.

 

Oh, no, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for! That is super interesting.
On that note, I'd like to know if there were any errors on my introduction; there's certainly some things that I may have missed.

 

Whoa, that textbook photo was exactly what I needed in terms of that missing context I was talking about. Thank you!
Yeah, with that in mind I'll go ahead and tweak parts of that introduction. I didn't know those blog posts existed, but that does explain a lot about the back-and-forth that I've observed with mixed-up romaji

 

Yeah I noticed that the phonology of Japanese is both simple yet hard to communicate
When I learned how some of the phonemes were pronounced, I attempted to explain it to others to the best of my ability (although I feel there's a better way to do it somewhere)
On that note, on and off I sometimes attempt to try and transcribe Japanese by ear. There are some words that still give me trouble (for example, じゃない). It can be hard and sometimes, when I figure out the actual sentence using a dictionary, it's far off from what I initially heard! But I could hear that phrase from the original audio once I knew what that phrase was

 

Here's an interesting example from the hidden credits stuffed inside the Ferie line of personal organizers. These two entries in these credits are Romaji that use a mix of the two systems.

Normally, you can't see this in normal operation; the device checks for the word "TEST" in RAM, and since none of the minigames ever write that string in RAM you have to take apart your Ferie, rig it with a setup that allows custom ROMs and use a patched version of the Ferie's ROM modified to write that string.

 

Buried in Sonic CD's eighth special stage upon completion is this credits screen.



It, too, mixes Kunrei and Hepburn. This also leds credence to this possibly being how the person spelled their own name; they're also credited like this in Chaotix.

 

I was sleep deprived. I was talking about this.