Toreba no Toraba: What the H?

Based on T-Ray’s Daily Sports Column / デイリースポーツの連載コラム”トレバーの虎場”から

Quiz: What do Yusuke Ohyama, Naomasa Yohkawa, Masashi Itoh, Ren Satoh, and Yukiya Saitoh have, but Teruaki Sato and Jo Endo lack? As an extra hint, Fumiya Hojoh both has and lacks this certain something. 

The answer is H. This may be a completely nonsensical article, but it might also shed some light on how names get spelled on jerseys and PR materials in Japanese professional baseball.

You see, the Japanese syllabary has different sounds that, transcribed into English, need some differentiating. Hanshin’s #3 is actually おおやま (O o ya ma) and not おやま (O ya ma). Both are legitimate Japanese surnames, though (大山 and 小山 respectively). The rest of the names listed above use the combination おう (or a phoneme that ends with お at the very least, like yo (よ), to (と), or jo (じょ), plus an extra う that essentially serves to elongate the pronunciation of the previous お sound.

And so, in an attempt to ensure that English speakers can properly say their names, many Japanese baseball teams elect to add an H in the spelling of the guys’ surnames. If it were spelled Ooyama, Youkawa, Itou, Satou and Saitou, which are faithful to the hiragana in their names, many who are unaware of the rules of Japanese would mispronounce the names, even to the point of it coming out as another name altogether.

In the case of Hojoh, his name is actually ほうじょう (Ho u jo u) and so, if he followed the “rules” like most of the other guys do, his name would be spelled Hohjoh. Oh-verkill, I know. But isn’t the ‘H’ overkill in most cases anyways? Particularly at the end of names. English speakers tend to pronounce the final O in words nice and long anyways (think “veto” or “hero”), so would we not pronounce Ito and Itoh the same, more or less? I like to think so.

Which is maybe why Teruaki Sato elected to go without a final H. (Unlike Ren Satoh, who has the exact same surname as Teru: 佐藤 = Sa to u). Maybe Teru is thinking ahead to a possible move overseas to the majors. Yoshitomo Tsutsugo, after all, removed the H from the end of his surname when he left the Baystars and joined the Tampa Bay Rays. But Shohei Ohtani, on the other hand, kept his H in there. (Perhaps this follows the Ohyama rule, in that おたに is a completely different surname – 小谷 – than his おおたに – 大谷).

Anyhow, I digress. I think the whole thing could be solved simply by “adding accents” (called “macron” or “yokobō” to long Japanese vowels… that’s how they were written in my very first Japanese textbooks: ā, ē, ī, ō, ū. The dash over the vowel is subtle but draws enough attention to itself to be pronounced differently (and more often than not, correctly).

I’d love to see the jerseys say Ōyama, Yōkawa, Itō, Satō, Saitō, and Hōjō. Looks kind of cool, does it not?

Not that it matters too much – it is the player’s individual choice in the end, and since it’s their name, who am I to dictate how they spell it? Still, it would be nice to have consistency from player to player, team to team, and league to league. 

OK, enough. Don’t get me started with first names. Or can you explain to me why it’s Koji (こうじ) Chikamoto and Kosuke (こうすけ) Baba, but Kouta (こうた) Inoue and Kouki (こうき) Moriya???