I’m having trouble understanding why 淤美豆奴 is commonly Latinized as Omitsunu or Oumitsunu. 豆 doesn’t seem to have a つ reading, and 淤 doesn’t seem to have a Ō reading (just ‘o’), so why is this translated the way it is? Even the Daidarabotchi page on Wikipedia follows this convention, not to mention numerous video games. Is there something I’m missing here?
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One of its onyomi is dzu. It just seems to be a less common reading.
There are no rules when it comes to names. If you ever find another confusing name reading like this, please refer back to this post.
At the time 淤美豆奴神 supposedly existed, Japan did not have a written expression, so when kanji was imported from China, characters were chosen to represent the sound in words or names.
This [article](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B7%A4%E7%BE%8E%E8%B1%86%E5%A5%B4%E7%A5%9E#:~:text=%E5%90%8D%E7%A7%B0%E3%82%84%E6%AF%8D%E8%A6%AA%E3%81%AE%E7%B3%BB%E8%AD%9C,%E5%90%8C%E4%B8%80%E7%A5%9E%E3%81%A8%E8%80%83%E3%81%88%E3%82%89%E3%82%8C%E3%82%8B%E3%80%82) explains how the kanji was chosen for this name. “「淤」は「大」の音約、「美豆」は「水」、「奴」は「主」で、名義は「偉大な水の主」とされる[2]。
Roughly translated to: 淤 is the transliteration of 大 (great), 美豆 is that of 水 (water), 奴 is that of 主 (in this case, God), and the name 淤美豆奴, as a whole means “the great God of water”.
淤 can be read “o”, and 奴 can be read “nu”, and mizu was meant to mean water. I hope this clears up the reason why 淤美豆奴 is written Omizunu and not Oumitsunu.