Year of the Demon

JAPANESE PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

Readers have been telling me they’d like a little guidance how to pronounce all the Japanese names they find in my work. Ask, dear reader, and ye shall receive. Three general rules tell you most of what you need to know:

1. The first syllable usually gets the emphasis (so it’s MA-ri-ko, not Ma-RI-ko).

2. Consonants are almost always pronounced just like English consonants.

3. Vowels are almost always pronounced just like Hawaiian vowels.

Yes, I know, you probably know about as much Hawaiian as you do Japanese, but the words you do know cover most of the bases: if you can pronounce aloha, hula, Waikiki, and King Kamehameha, you’ve got your vowels. Barring that, if you took a Romance language in high school, you’re good to go. Or, if you prefer lists and tables:

a as in father

ae as in taekwondo

ai as in aisle

ao as in cacao

e as in ballet

ei as in neighbor

i as in machine

o as in open

u as in super

There are two vowel sounds we don’t have in English: ō and ū. Just ignore them. My Japanese teachers would slap me on the wrist for saying that, but unless you’re studying Japanese yourself, the difference between the short vowels (o and u) and the long vowels (ō and ū) is so subtle that you might not even hear it (and if you can’t see a difference between them, it’s probably because the e-reader you’re using doesn’t support the long vowel characters). The reason I include the long vowels in my books is that spelling errors make me squirm. What can I say? I’ve spent my entire adult life in higher education.

As for consonants, g is always a hard g (like gum, not gym) and almost everything else is just like you’d hear it in English. There’s one well-known exception: Japanese people learning English often have a hard time distinguishing L’s from R’s. The reason for this is that there is neither an L sound nor an R sound in Japanese. The ri of Mariko is somewhere between ree, lee, and dee. The choice to Romanize with an r was more or less arbitrary, and it actually had more to do with Portuguese than with English. (Fun fact: if linguistic history had gone just a little further in that direction, this could have been a book about Marico Oxiro, not Mariko Oshiro.)

Finally, for those who want to know not just how to pronounce the Japanese words but also what they mean, you’ll find a glossary at the end of this book.