Was wondering if there ever was a city or place in japan named Hbe saw the name in a book but can’t find anything on it online?
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/vjbkxt/japanese_city_named_hbe/
Was wondering if there ever was a city or place in japan named Hbe saw the name in a book but can’t find anything on it online?
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/vjbkxt/japanese_city_named_hbe/
10 comments
You sure that wasn’t just a bad OCR of Ise or something?
“H” is not a syllable in the Japanese language so I think you misread something.
Edit: Possibly Kobe or Ube.
“Hbe” is not exactly possible to pronounce in Japanese. Do you recall the name of the book?
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writing error perhaps but hibe exists
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.
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This mean that there is different possibilities, but it is likely a typo, a mistake, a strange way to transcribe in roman letters.
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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.
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It might be possible to find the city with more context of what is written in the article and even when it was written.
Hbe isn’t a Japanese word. There is a city called Ube though
No such sound as “hb” in Japanese.
Maybe Hino?
Could be Ube city in Yamaguchi Pref.
One possibility may be it’s a typo of [Ube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ube,_Yamaguchi) in western Japan, maybe?