Kagoshima City Place Names That Locals Have to Explain to Others
Kagoshima City has several neighborhood names that almost no first-time reader gets right on the first try. Toso, Koorimoto, Inuzako, and Minayoshi are all live administrative place names today, and each one carries a story that reaches back to the medieval period.
Most unusually read place names in Japan survive because old readings from the medieval or Edo period were carried forward through later mergers and address reorganizations, rather than being updated to match modern reading habits. Kagoshima City has several such holdovers.
This article covers four names with well documented origins, starting with Toso, a name featured in reference works such as the Dictionary of Hard-to-Read Place Names, alongside the story behind each one.
Names where the reading itself defies the kanji
Toso and Koorimoto both use readings that depart from how their kanji are normally pronounced, making them classic stumbling blocks.
Toso (唐湊)Toso
Both kanji in this name are common characters, yet together they are read Toso, an irregular reading with no obvious link to either character on its own. Two explanations survive for the name: that the area was once a harbor where ships from Tang-dynasty China moored, or that Chinese settlers once lived there; neither has been confirmed. The name is listed as a hard-to-read place name in reference works including the Dictionary of Hard-to-Read Place Names (1993) and the Historical Place Names of Japan series (1998).
Source:Wikipedia, Toso (唐湊)
Koorimoto (郡元)Koorimoto
The character normally read gun, meaning district, is instead read koori here, an older reading preserved in this one place name. Records of the name reach back to the Nanboku-cho period, and a 1354 land grant document already refers to the area by the related name Gunmoto. Today, most of the neighborhood is occupied by Kagoshima University's Koorimoto campus, along with its attached elementary and junior high schools.
Names that only click once you hear the story
Inuzako and Minayoshi are less about a strange reading and more about the story behind them: a folk explanation for one, a 1950 merger for the other.
Inuzako (犬迫町)Inuzako-cho
The name Inuzako is said to come from the idea that the local mountains were so deep and the valleys so tangled that even a dog wandering in could not find its way back out. The name already appears in documents from the Muromachi period, and by the Edo period the area held Yokoi Nomachi, the only merchant district of its kind in the Kagoshima area, lined with teahouses and shochu shops along the Satsuma highway.
Source:Wikipedia, Inuzako-cho (犬迫町)
Minayoshi (皆与志町)Minayoshi-cho
This district was created in 1950, when the village of Ishiki was absorbed into Kagoshima City and its two former sections, Kaibo and Hishijima, were merged and renamed after Minayoshi Elementary School. The old village of Hishijima is also known as the birthplace of Kawaji Toshiyoshi, the first Dai-keishi, a post equivalent to today's Superintendent-General of police, and remembered as the father of the modern Japanese police.
Source:Wikipedia, Minayoshi-cho (皆与志町)Kagoshima Prefectural Police, The Father of Japanese Policing: Kawaji Toshiyoshi
FAQ
Why does Kagoshima City have so many hard-to-read place names?
Address reorganizations and municipal mergers mainly redraw district boundaries and reassign names; they are not a mechanism for revising how existing place names are pronounced. Kagoshima is not unique here — old, unusual readings surviving intact is a pattern found all across Japan.
Were Inuzako and Minayoshi ever part of the same municipality?
Yes. Both were part of the village of Ishiki, formed in 1889 in what was then Kagoshima District, and both took their current names when Ishiki was absorbed into Kagoshima City in 1950. The two neighborhoods sit facing each other across the Kotsuki River.
Does the koori reading of 郡 show up in other place names too?
The reading koori for that character appears elsewhere in Japan, though whether it survives depends heavily on local history. What stands out about Kagoshima's Koorimoto is that this older reading, already documented in the Nanboku-cho period, has been kept intact through to the present address system.
How solid is the evidence behind these origin stories?
It varies. Toso has two competing, unconfirmed explanations, and that is fairly typical: most place-name origins rest on later oral tradition rather than a single contemporaneous record, so it is more accurate to treat them as the leading theory rather than settled fact.