Paradox is horrible at dynamic place names to the point they should not bother with them anymore
Japan in the Great Wave got a state overhaul and they also updated the state names to use modern Romanji transliteration to give us accurate state names! Cool!
Except the implementation is terrible. They have updated the spelling of some place names and use different transliterations in others. Tohoku is now Tōhoku but Hokkaido is not Hokkaidō. The Japanese region doesn't even have proper naming and Korea (for which they made a specific journal entry to annex and integrate) has ZERO Japanese dynamic names. Taiwan, Japan self-proclaimed "model colony" has no dynamic state names either. They designed, created and tested a Journal Entry for assimilation but cannot be bothered to add a few lines to a localization text file.
Whatever, who cares about Japan in the Victorian era anyways. Oh wait, German some place names in Austrian Carpathians/Balkans the broke as well. Historical regions like Russian Poland are just not localized at all. Is the Kingdom of Poland in Russia really so obscure that we cannot implement properly transliterated dynamic names? Because I found that within 15 seconds on wikipedia.
As for the cherry on top, some states like Greenland, District of Columbia and Ryukyu cannot be renamed. They just have no city names if you open the window to rename them. I annexed Greenland as the US and wanted to rename them but apparently the technology isn't there yet.
I would be surprised if PDX didn't have a history of absolutely terrible dynamic place names for over a decade. Throwback to when in EU4 their Japan DLC broke Japanese place names as well and a fan took the time to literally list the Japanese names for EVERY settlement in EU4's China, Vietnam, Manchuria and Pacific region.
At this point, why bother with dynamic place names if they aren't maintained or checked with updates? Either:
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Properly and thoroughly implement native transliteration. Like I said before this has historically been impossible for PDX. For example, the EU5 DLC focused around restoring the Roman Empire turns your place names into Turkish if you restore it. They just don't have it in them.
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Just anglicize the place names. The Japanese will forgive the devs for writing Kanto instead of Kantō.
Posted Jun 4, 2026, 1:00 AM UTC