Japanese city named Hbe?

10 comments

1. You sure that wasn’t just a bad OCR of Ise or something?

2. “H” is not a syllable in the Japanese language so I think you misread something.

   Edit: Possibly Kobe or Ube.

3. “Hbe” is not exactly possible to pronounce in Japanese. Do you recall the name of the book?

4. [deleted]

5. writing error perhaps but hibe exists

6. No, impossible.

   The reason is simple. All words in Japanese can we written in hiragana. A hiragana is a phonetic symbol that represent a syllable.

   So if you go on [this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana#Table_of_hiragana) and check the table, you can see that there is syllables starting by H, like ha は, but in itself, h does not exist.

   On the other hand, there is a syllable for be べ.

   ​

   This mean that there is different possibilities, but it is likely a typo, a mistake, a strange way to transcribe in roman letters.

   ​

   Looking at at list of just over 1800 Japanese city/town names that are two syllable and finish by be, I found these : Tobe, Kobe, Ube (some that other people have also pointed out), there might be other options especially considering that a lot of smaller town have been merged, so go back 50 years and you might have more options.

   ​

   It might be possible to find the city with more context of what is written in the article and even when it was written.

7. Hbe isn’t a Japanese word. There is a city called Ube though

8. No such sound as “hb” in Japanese.

   Maybe Hino?

9. Could be Ube city in Yamaguchi Pref.

10. One possibility may be it’s a typo of [Ube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ube,_Yamaguchi) in western Japan, maybe?