The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.

Where does Hepburn disambiguate?

In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).

Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!

This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.

There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.

I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?

Some Japanese words entered Russian not directly, but through English. In these cases, the word is first romanized using Hepburn, and then adapted to Russian using English-to-Russian rules. A classic example is 寿司, which Polianov would render as суси (susi), but Russians mostly know as суши (sushi). Then there are words which actually do faithfully follow Polianov, as in 新宿, which is written as Синдзуку (Sindzuku) instead of Шинджуку (Shinjuku).

For people not interested in learning Japanese, however, a unified romanization could have its benefits. It just never struck me as particularly inconsistent to begin with, even after so many years living there.

> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.

I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.

Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1

[edit]

Wikipedia suggests it might be from Wāpuro rōmaji, where "u" is always used to spell the kana "う"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972

I have Real Real Japan on my YouTube algorithm. So, I’m a bit of an expert on this topic…

As a Westerner I know very little Japanese but having worked in Japan for a short while I take an interest in the language.

When reading this it occurred to me there might have been more reason for adopting the Hepburn spelling than stated. As as English speaker I've noticed how poorly we pronounce Japanese words and perhaps this change is also intended as a subtle way of letting us know.

English has a long tradition of stealing words from other languages then mangling them almost beyond recognition because we're too lazy to take efforts to pronounce them correctly. To me, this is a form of language arrogance.

Foe example, I've long complained about the adoption in recent decades of the word tsunami into English and then mangling its pronunciation beyond recognition.

I'm old enough to remember when 'tidal wave' was the generally accepted wording for that ocean phenomenon—now we've replaced these perfectly understandable and descriptive English words with tsunami, which to English speakers is both seemingly unpronounceable and conveys no meaningful description in English.

Right, the introduction of the unpronounceable tsunami into English unnecessarily increased the entropy of the language a notch further. Why, for what purpose? Seems to me the only plausible reason is more because of erudite snobbishness than out of any practical utilitarian reason.

That said, I'm not opposed to English stealing words from foreign languages when it makes sense, for example the German zeitgeist is a wonderful expressive replacement for the spirit of the times, similarly translating say gedankenexperiment is straightforward but we don't do so as the word has a rich contextual meaning for physicists both in English and other languages. Thus, it's best left as is.

Back to tsunami. Whenever I hear the word mispronounced by those who ought to know better it just grates badly, the mangled mispronunciation distracts my attention from what's actually being said. So often one hears TV newsreaders including those on the BBC slur the word as 'sooonami' when clearly its English spelling indicates the correct pronunciation. Tsu, つ, sounds like a hissing snake—say it to yourself. Is that not obvious?

Fashion should not be the reason for stealing foreign words but rather because it makes sense to do so. Moreover, we should be respectful of the languages from whence these words came. Perhaps the adoption of the Hepburn spellings is a Japanese hint suggesting that we try a little harder.

The kana are usually written in a table where each row is a vowel and each column is a consonant, like on Wikipedia[1]. Most columns of the table have five characters, each representing the same consonant combined with one of the vowels. For example: か/き/く/け/こ ka/ki/ku/ke/ko, ま/み/む/め/も ma/mi/mu/me/mo. Some columns have "missing" sounds (や/ゆ/よ ya/yu/yo); but what's important for our purposes is that some columns have irregular sounds: さ/し/す/せ/そ sa/shi/su/se/so and た/ち/つ/て/と ta/chi/tsu/te/to. There are no si, ti, or tu sounds in standard Japanese; they have shi, chi, and tsu instead.

Using diacritic markings gets you more consonants. Most of these are made by adding a couple tick marks to the corner of the character, which makes the consonant voiced instead of unvoiced. For example: か ka -> が ga, と to -> ど do, ひ hi -> び bi. But the irregular sounds stay irregular: し shi -> じ ji instead of zi, ち chi -> ぢ ji (again) instead of di, and つ tsu -> づ zu instead of du. (す su -> ず zu gives the same sound but in a regular way.)

You can also combine i-vowel characters with y-consonant characters to get sounds with consonant clusters: き ki + や ya = きゃ kya, み mi + よ yo = みょ myo, etc. The irregular sounds remain irregular: し shi + ゆ yu = しゅ shu (instead of syu), ち chi + や ya = ちゃ cha (instead of tya), じ ji + よ yo = じょ jo (instead of zyo). There's a Reddit post with a nice table showing all the available sounds[2].

Now the problem for romanization is this: Should the romanization reflect the irregular sounds in the spoken language? Or should it reflect the regular groupings of the kana characters? づ and ず might both be pronounced "zu", but they come from different linguistic origins, just as "bear" and "bare" do in English. The Hepburn system uses spellings that match the sounds, while the current standard (Kunrei-shiki) uses spellings that match the kana grouping: し si (instead of shi), ち ti (instead of chi), じ zi (instead of ji), つ tu (instead of tsu), じょ syo (instead of sho), etc.

The Hepburn system tells you how to pronounce the word[3] at the cost of being a lossy encoding. For anyone familiar with the Latin alphabet, that's almost always the better choice, and it's nearly universal in the Western world. Kunrei-shiki does better reflect the underlying structure of the Japanese language and its native writing system, which is probably why the Japanese government preferred it. But anyone who wants to learn the language is going to learn the kana almost immediately (it's just a few hours with flash cards), so IMHO that's pretty small advantage.

I deliberately didn't talk about long vowels, glottal stops, the differences between hiragana and katakana, different pronunciations of ん (n), or how to handle ん (n) followed by a vowel, but if you're curious about Japanese romanization those topics may also be of interest to you. I can try to explain more if anyone's curious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kana_chart_1.png [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/awzw04/kana_... [3] Most of the consonants are the same as English or close enough and are trivial to write in the Latin alphabet. The big exception is ら/り/る/れ/ろ, normally written ra/ri/ru/re/ro but it's not really the English r sound. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap...

This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.

Is that an anti-China thing? Or is it a simplification thing?

I don't fully understand the underlying motivation.