Style Sheet

MN follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, for most questions of style and format. For spellings, the journal generally follows Merriam-Webster. The MN Style Sheet covers primarily issues related to the presentation of Japan-related subject matter in English and stylistic policies particular to the journal. The MN Style Sheet is available here.

MN Style-Sheet (pdf)

Instructions for
Article Authors

The journal welcomes submissions of article manuscripts at any time. Please note that MN articles are expected to be based on research in Japanese primary and secondary sources. MN is relatively flexible about length but recommends that submissions be under 20,000 words. Manuscripts should be submitted by email to the MN office in both Word and PDF formats. To ensure a full, double-blind review, please do not identify yourself by name anywhere in the text or footnotes of your article, or in any running headers or footers.

The copyright to articles and reviews published in MN belongs to the journal. Before submitting a manuscript to MN, please be aware that the article—including earlier versions that are substantially similar—should not have been published previously, circulated widely electronically, or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. We ask authors whose manuscripts have been accepted for publication not to distribute them in printed or electronic form without our permission. MN readily grants permission for the reprinting of published articles in anthologies or other collections or for their reproduction for classroom use. Requests for permission for such uses should be sent by email to the MN office.

When submitting a translation, please supply an electronic copy of the text on which it is based. If you wish to incorporate photographic or other illustrative material, please provide electronic copies of this material, as well as a list of accompanying citations. Note that email messages, including attachments, cannot exceed 25 MB; for the submission of files exceeding this limit, please contact the MN office.

Although adherence to all aspects of MN style is not essential at the time of submission, authors whose articles have been accepted for publication will be asked to make sure that their manuscripts conform to the journal’s established format. They may thus find it saves time and effort to consult the MN Style Sheet early on for information about MN’s citation format and other stylistic policies. In particular, it will be helpful if the following are attended to from the outset: (1) Notes should be numbered consecutively and should appear at the bottom of the page as footnotes. (2) Kanji should be included for Japanese and other East Asian names and terms. (3) A list of references should appear at the end of the article and should include all works cited in footnotes; works without at least one footnote citation should not be listed.

Instructions for
Review Authors

MN does not accept unsolicited offers to review particular books. MN reviews of single books generally range in length from 1,500 to 3,500 words; reviews covering two or more books generally range from 2,000 to 6,000 words. Reviews should be submitted as Word documents attached to an email message.

The copyright to a review belongs to MN. The review may not be released to any other publication, posted on the Internet, or otherwise circulated publicly without the express permission of the journal. Requests for permission should be sent by email to the MN office.

Listed here are a few matters of style with particular relevance to book reviews. MN follows The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), 17th edition, for most style questions. See also the MN Style Sheet.

1. Italics/Japanese Terms

Italicize Japanese terms (and other foreign-language terms) except for those that have entered the English language as indicated by their inclusion in standard English-language reference works. For this purpose, MN primarily follows the usage in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary or Merriam-Webster Unabridged (see merriam-webster.com and unabridged.merriam-webster.com)—collectively referred to below as Merriam-Webster—and also in certain cases adopts the usage in the Oxford English Dictionary.

However, note the following spellings adopted by MN regardless of their appearance in the above sources:
　　kabuki, not Kabuki
　　bunraku, not Bunraku
　　romaji, not Romaji
　　noh, not No, Nō, or Noh

2. Macrons and Plurals

Provide macrons for all but anglicized words (shogun, daimyo, etc.). Place names follow the same principle; consult Merriam-Webster and other standard English-language reference works. Quotations from a Western-language work that deviates from these principles should preserve its usage.

For Japanese names and terms, including anglicized terms, use the same form as both singular and plural:
　　the two daimyo; the third, sixth, and seventh Tokugawa shogun

Kanji are generally not included in MN book reviews except where the characters as such are directly relevant to the discussion at hand.

3. Punctuation

Punctuation following a quotation identified by a page number goes outside the parentheses (except in the case of indented block quotations).

Punctuation (except for colons and semicolons) is placed inside quotation marks:
　　“Seeing is believing,” said the teacher; but, “Seeing is believing”; but it was not what I expected.
In a series of three or more elements, the elements are separated by commas.

4. Page Number References

Use a “p.” (plural: “pp.”) when providing a parenthetical reference to a page number:
　　“She makes the tradition [of women’s speech] work for her” (p. 40).
　　. . . despite her intent to encompass a “multiplicity” of feminisms (p. xv).

Spell out “page” when the reference is not parenthetical.
　　“. . . the discussion from page 34 to page 55 pertains to . . .”

5. Endnotes

Endnotes should be avoided wherever possible and used only for the purpose of citing works referred to in the text; any discursive content should be incorporated into the body of the review.

Provide full bibliographic information using the note (not bibliography) format presented in CMS:
　　 ¹ Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits: Takano Chōei, Takahashi Keisaku, and Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), p. 15.

6. Capitalization

Parts of a book (preface, introduction, chapter, part, section) are lowercased.

7. Numbers

Numerals identifying parts of a book are arabic (e.g., “chapter 1”).

Inclusive dates are given in full:
　　1868–1887.

Page numbers:
　　Under 100 give full digits: pp. 69–70; pp. 65–67; pp. 6–17; pp. 17–25.
　　For numbers 100 to 109, give full digits; for numbers 110 and above, drop the duplicated hundreds digit. Follow the same principles for 200s, 300s, etc.: pp. 100–104, 185–95, 201–20.