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The story
A thread on 5ch’s Hello! Project board asked where people first learned to read the kanji “東雲” (Shinonome), and the answers came in all over the map — station names, place names, horse-race names, manga and anime character names. Some picked it up from real-world names like Shinonome Station in Tokyo’s Koto Ward or the horse race “Shinonome Sho,” while others knew it from the final boss’s name in Custom Robo or a KAN album. Since it’s a reading you’d basically never run into in daily life, the scattered answers ended up revealing what places and media each person happens to be into.
What people said
Me, I'm from Nichijou
Shinonome Station
There used to be an Up-Front recording studio there
Guess otaku would know it?
Shiotsu (四方津) and Yanagawa (梁川) are station names I can't read either
No idea how that turns into "Shiotsu" or "Yanagawa"
If you can already read "梁," there's no trick to Yanagawa at all.
It got famous thanks to a former idol and a politician too
Oh, is this because of where the recording studio was located?
Re: #16
I ended up landing on the Shinonome store
Also the "Strike Bushi" folk song
I remember hearing a song he wrote about that time
"東" sure has a lot of weird readings
Though by rural standards it's small
Background and Talking Points on This Topic
“東雲” (Shinonome) is a jukujikun — a special reading assigned to a whole word rather than a standard kun’yomi or on’yomi — and it’s one of those readings school kanji lessons simply skip. The same place name turns up all over Japan, including Koto Ward in Tokyo and Osaka, and the characters also show up in horse-race names and the proper names of idols, manga, and anime — which is exactly why this thread’s answers were all over the place. People cited everything from station and place names, to the horse race “Shinonome Sho,” to manga and anime character names, and there’s no real disagreement in the thread — what makes the exchange interesting is simply how differently each person ran into the same two characters, depending on where they live and what they’re into. It suggests that place-name jukujikun like this tend to get learned not through school, but through proper nouns encountered in everyday life.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hello! Project) thread “東雲 (Shinonome) — What made you able to read this kanji?.”
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