While on a vacation in Japan, I bought the soundtracks to the PlayStation 2 games “Katamari Damacy” and “We ♥ Katamari”. These CDs were produced for the Japanese market, and are labeled entirely in Japanese.

When I got home from my trip, I ripped the CDs to Vorbis files on my computer, as I do with all CDs that I buy. As part of that process, I needed to tag the song files with the title and artist names, but they’re written in Japanese characters that I can’t readily type, and I didn’t really want to use the Japanese characters anyway since I can’t read them.

So I spent some time and did some research, and came up with a complete list of the transliterated names of everyone who’s credited for the music on this pair of albums.

The names written in Japanese are exactly the ones that appear in the cover booklets of the two CDs, and the Latin transliterations were obtained through many hours of looking up Kanji characters in the online Unihan Database and the GNOME Character Map, and searching the Web with Google. Some of these people, such as Yu Miyake, have their transliterated names mentioned frequently on the Web and were easy to find; others were very difficult, and required more creative searching and occasional guess-and-check.

Note that if you don’t have Japanese fonts installed on your computer, you won’t be able to see the Japanese characters on these pages. If ‘大’ appears as a box or question mark or something, rather than the Kanji character for “big”, you’re missing Japanese fonts. (Windows XP users: open Control Panel, choose “Regional and Language Options”, change to the “Languages” tab, and check the “Install files for East Asian languages” box.)