What’s In A Name

Today I was listening to a television news journalist and I heard, for the first time, someone correctly pronounce the name Fukushima. (Fukushima is the Japanese city that had a nuclear disaster after it was struck by a tsunami in 2011.)

It doesn’t surprise me that people mispronounce names. But in the age of Internet search engines, it’s so easy to learn the correct pronunciation of a word that it’s almost a mark of laziness when people don’t bother to do so. Especially if your job involves speaking to millions of people.

Ever since the nuclear accident, most Americans have pronounced Fukushima this way:

fuu kuu SHEEE ma

I suppose people do this to make it sound similar to another widely mispronounced name: Hiroshima. Most Americans pronounce that name this way:

hero SHEEE ma

Both pronunciations are wrong. Fukushima is correctly pronounced this way:

f’KUU sh’ma  (KUU is lightly accented.)

The schwa is an “uh” sound represented by the symbol ə. I replaced it with an apostrophe because Japanese speakers put so little stress on those syllables that the schwa sound virtually disappears and you only hear the consonant.

Similarly, Hiroshima is pronounced this way:

hih ROH she ma (The 1st i sounds like the i in sit; ROH is lightly accented.)

If you’re on television, try to get it right! It’s why you’re paid the big bucks.