Is it Otani or Ohtani?

Shohei Otani has been in the news a lot this fall. His Fighters won the Japan series title, he won Pacific League MVP, he hit a ball into the Tokyo Dome roof, and there is speculation surrounding a potential posting. Late-breaking rumors saying that he still may be posted after next season despite changes in MLB’s new CBA which would seem to prevent against it.

This post isn’t about the CBA, though. I talk about Otani a lot on twitter, and I’ve been asked a lot “Why do you call him Otani when his uniform says ‘Ohtani?’”. It’s a fairly straightforward question, but it takes more than 140 characters to answer. Now I’ll have something to point to, because I’m lazy. I’ve also been studying Japanese for, uh, three weeks, and I think I have enough background that I can describe the issue semi-competently.

Otani’s name isn’t actually “Otani” or “Ohtani,” it’s “大谷”. These characters are called Kanji. The characters originated in China, but were brought over to Japan multiple times and formed the building blocks of their written language. There are thousands of them, and many of them can be said in several ways.

Of course, we write it as “Otani” or “Ohtani,” not as “大谷.” The source of the confusion is how the word is actually said, and the best way to explain that is hiragana. Hiragana is another part of the Japanese language, but it’s much simpler, a system of 46 symbols and 60 modifiers which creates every sound that can be made in the native Japanese language. Converting the Kanji in Otani’s name into Hiragana starts to reveal some of the confusion:

大 = おお (ohhh)

谷 = たに (ta-ni)

We have three sounds to deal with, then we translate them into roman letters. The “tani” bit is pretty easy. The “ohhh” bit isn’t. Keep in mind that we’re converting something from one lettering system to another very different one and things aren’t always going to be straightforward.

You’ll notice that the “大 = おお” has two hiragana symbols. In English, when we double up letters, it doesn’t sound the same. “O” is different from “oo.” This is not the case in Japanese. Instead, the sound extends for a longer duration (and is only said once). If you write out Otani’s name in Hiragana, you get おおたに (o —ta-ni). The O sound gets two beats, the ta gets one beat, and the ni gets the last.

Here’s a highlight of an Otani homerun during last month’s pre-WBC friendly matches. If you listen to the call, you can hear the “o” going on for just a little bit longer than the “tani.”

The problem is that when converting that from sound to romaji (roman alphabet), there isn’t a great consensus on how.

The back of Otani’s jersey says “Ohtani.” That’s not a bad way to write it out. Meanwhile, NPB’s website and Baseball Reference have it as “Otani.” When he was in high school, his uniforms said “Otani.” The Japan Times writes his name as “Otani” too, for reasons that writer Jason Coskrey laid out on twitter:

So, really, the answer is that “we don’t know.” I tend towards “Otani” because of the answers laid out above, but it’s also hard to go against the fact that “Ohtani” is what his uniform says. Just remember that his name is actually 大谷 and say it correctly and you’ll be most of the way there already.