上野駅の不忍口

Sometimes Japanese language can be really confusing, especially when it comes to the characters called Kanji 漢字 and how to read them. Usually there are rules. But as we know, rules are meant to be broken.. :)

So here is one example from Ueno-station 上野駅 in northern Tokyo area. One of the station's exits is called 不忍口. Now, a question for all those who are familiar with the characters: could you read them? I guess not (at least that was what I couldn't do). Anyway, here is the clue:

Let's look at it character by character: first there is the character 不 which means "not" and the common pronunciation would be "fu". The second one is the character 忍, which means "to bear" or "to endure" and common pronunciation would be "nin" or "shino(bu)". Its also the "nin" in the word Ninja 忍者 (basically "people who hide" or "people who can endure") and the "shino" in the word Shinobi 忍び (a male Japanese Ninja). The last one of course means mouth but in this reference exit/entrance and is pronounced "guchi/kuchi" 口.

So, back to the initial question, how should we read this word? Fu-Nin-Guchi? Fu-Shino-Guchi? Thats what I would have thought from the beginning but thats completely wrong.

The correct reading is "Shinobazu-guchi".



Now, why the hell is it Shinobazu when the first character has a reading that doesn't appear and the second has the reading which appears first? To be honest, I don't know and couldn't find out much. The things I know is that this exit/entrance is so famous that almost any Japanese can recognize it even with its strange reading. For foreigners who are able to speak Japanese it is an almost impossible task to find out the correct reading on their own because the kanji for this pronunciation doesn't even appear when you enter it into your computer, as it is the case with many Kanji which serve for Japanese names.

Here is my guess how it has this kind of reading. The meaning probably derives from Chinese language where the character for "not" precedes the one which it tries to give the negative connotation. Looking it up in a dictionary it says that those two characters are pronounced bùrěn and means to "can't endure" or "don't have the heart to do sth. Now back to Japanese, to express this phrase one probably would write "shinobanai" 忍ばない. However, as there is more than one way to build the negative-form of a verb in the Japanese language, you can also say "shinobazu" 忍ばず.

That pretty much explains why they read it that way. However, I still can't figure out why they take the Chinese way of writing and read it like a Japanese phrase, which don't fit at all.