Name Is The Game At ‘98 Olympics

NAH-gah-no or Nah-GAH-no?

That’s the befuddling question leading to the Feb. 7-22 Nagano Olympics.

What do Nagano officials say? They don’t know either.

Conductors on Nagano train platforms stress the first syllable, announcing: “The bullet train will soon arrive at NAH-gah-no station.”

Residents in the southern part of the prefecture refer to their home as “Nah-GAH-no.”

And national broadcaster NHK, considered the arbiter of Japanese pronunciation, hedges by reporting on the “NAH-GAH-NO” Games, giving equal emphasis to each syllable in line with standard diction.

The only consensus is that Nah-gah-NO is a definite no-no.

“It is difficult to say for sure what the correct way of pronouncing it is,” Masanori Moriya, a city official in Nagano, which literally means “long field,” said Wednesday.