On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Josh Gordon wrote:
Was it? Our [[Godzilla]] article speculates (unsourced, probably needs citing) that it's a matter of using the wrong transliteration; 㸠is "ji" in modern Hepburn romanization, while it's "dzi" in the first edition of his dictionary.
Um, the article says nothing about a dictionary in that context.
Personally I'm skeptical that it's an error because at the time, Japanese material was routinely changed a lot when brought over, the names being the least part of it.
But even then, there's another difference: the name is already in such wide use that Wikipedia isn't going to affect it much. Google shows that "Godzilla" has 11 times the hits of "Gojira". But Tetsusaiga gives me 112000 hits and Tessaiga gives me 83300; under these circumstances, Wikipedia is likely to *influence* adoption of the incorrect name. (Especially since there are fewer independent reference works dealing with Tessiaga than with Godzilla, so Wikipedia's influence is a much bigger piece of the pie.)