I recently changed the primary name from Shin'ichirô Ueda to Shinichiro Ueda. So I removed the apostrophe and changed the ô into an o.

Now somebody else has reverted my change, setting it to Shin'ichirô Ueda again. I don't just want to change it again and start an edit war, so I'm starting this thread to discuss.

So to be clear, his real name is 上田慎一郎, but since TMDb doesn't support name localization yet, according to the TMDb bible, we should use the romaji spelling.

Shin'ichirô Ueda is the romaji spelling used on IMDb, but that is no reason to also use it on TMDb. IMDb has its own special set of rules for transliteration, which often don't match general standards.

I changed it to Shinichiro Ueda, because that is the most common spelling found online, on sites like Wikipedia. But the most common way of transliterating Japanese (Hepburn romanization) would make it Shin'ichirō Ueda. So pretty close to IMDb, but using ō instead of ô.

So basically, I would be fine with Shinichiro Ueda or Shin'ichirō Ueda, but Shin'ichirô Ueda is just IMDb being IMDb. Unfortunately the TMDb bible doesn't have clear rules about which transliteration method to use.

For now I will change the name to Shin'ichirō Ueda. It's closer to what it is now than Shinichiro Ueda.