In the past, domain names could only contain English characters, so websites that wanted a Japanese domain name would be forced to use Romaji.  For example, nyuusu.com might be used instead of ニュース.com. However, Romaji domains have several disadvantages:

• They aren’t “real” Japanese
• They look unfamiliar to Japanese people
• They don’t elicit an emotional response
• They are hard to remember
• They are not good for SEO (search engine optimization)

All of these problems are solved by IDNs (International Domain Names). IDNs are domains that can contain real Japanese characters in any combination of Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. By developing this site with the IDN ヨガ.com, we hope to make the web a more comfortable place for our Japanese visitors.

Since the major social media companies still do not allow Japanese characters in names, we use the letters “IDN” in our social media names (twitter.com/yoga_idn and instagram.com/yoga_idn). We also use the domain yogaidn.com in our social sharing links, but they simply redirect to the actual pages on ヨガ.com.