Established in 1974, the Journal of Japanese Studies features original, analytically rigorous articles from across the humanities and social sciences, including comparative and transnational scholarship in which Japan plays a major part

Style Sheet

Manuscript Formatting

Manuscripts should be double-spaced throughout, including block quotations and endnotes (these will ultimately appear in print as footnotes). Authors are responsible for providing professional-quality, camera-ready copy as well as copyright permissions (where appropriate) for images. Manuscripts should be paginated with no other header or footer information. Microsoft Word (for PC) is preferred for final files submitted for copy editing; submissions may be sent as PDF files.

Citation Style

Anything that is to ultimately be printed in italics should appear in the manuscript with underlining.

JJS footnote citations mostly follow The Chicago Manual of Style as shown in the examples below. Do not use the author-date system of social science style. In reviews, page numbers of the book under review may be cited in parentheses in the text.  JJS no longer includes place of publication in book citations.

Books: John Whitney Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan, 500–1700 (Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 129–54.

Articles in Periodicals: Chalmers Johnson, “Japan: Who Governs? An Essay on Official Bureaucracy,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1975), pp. 22–27; Noguchi Yukio, “Nihon de Keynes seisaku wa okonawareta ka—kyoto datta Keynes no jidai,” Kikan gendai keizai, No. 52 (1983), pp. 163–83.

Essays from Edited Works: Shumpei Okamoto, “The Emperor and the Crowd: The Historical Significance of the Hibiya Riot,” in Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japanese History (Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 258–75.

Websites: Democratic Party of Japan, “DPJ Manifesto for the 2005 House of Representatives Election,” August 30, 2005, http://www.dpj.or.jp/english/manifesto5/pdf/manifesto_05.pdf, p. 9 (accessed July 7, 2010).
Provide sufficient information for readers to look up your citations. Use a short title for repeated citations of the same work: Noguchi, “Keynes seisaku.” Ibid. may be used, but loc. cit., op cit., and passim may not.

Romanization of Japanese: Japanese names and terms should follow Hepburn romanization (chi, sho, etc.). Use the macron (ō) to indicate long vowels (except ii). Only if your software cannot produce macrons is an alternative diacritic (such as ô or õ) acceptable. Use n rather than m before syllables beginning with m, b, and p (such as shinbun).  No macrons are used in JJS on modern reign names or common place names (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, the 47 prefectures, and Japan’s four main islands), except when those appear in a Japanese-language phrase or proper noun (e.g., Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai). Shintō is set in roman letters with a macron.

Japanese Names and Terms: Japanese names should be written with the family name first, unless the person usually uses Western name order in Western-language publications. Quotations and poetry cited in Japanese should appear in quotation marks and not be italicized or underlined. Treat as for any foreign language.  Some Japanese words are widely accepted in English, and JJS prints these without italics: anime, haiku, kabuki, manga, sumo, shogun, and yakuza, for example. Italics are retained for other terms, such as bakumatsu, burakumin, daimyō, kokugaku, nō, renga, sake, and zainichi.

Spelling/Punctuation

Please consult Webster’s Dictionary for preferred spellings. Centuries are spelled out: sixteenth, seventeenth, etc. Whole numbers of ten or less should be spelled out. Use figures when citing many numbers or numbers larger than ten. “Periods and commas should be placed within quotations marks.” Per cent is two words. Dates follow U.S. convention: April 15, 2008. Names of Japanese organizations and titles of Japanese works should appear in romanized Japanese (with English translations provided in parentheses).

Please consult The Chicago Manual of Style for guidance on hyphenation. For example, these prefixes are used without hyphenation: pre, post, non, anti, un, and co.

Text elements of other works appear in lower-case letters with arabic numbers (chapter 2, part 1). United States should be used as a noun, U.S. for the adjective. The serial or “Oxford” comma is used for items in a list: red, blue, and yellow.
Please contact us if you are uncertain how to format or spell or punctuate a particular recurring element in your manuscript.