Grokking Japanese Place and Personal Names

I've been absorbed in reading NHK News lately, so this link from the RevTK forums was a welcome site. Reading Japanese Crime Articles isn't as detailed as the Mizutani's　新聞で学ぶ日本語, but it provides some useful information on the structure of Japanese newspaper articles and on the terms used for specific crimes. Author Stephen Smith also includes a number of actual Japanese crime articles accompanied by his own translations, so that learners can check their understanding of the text.

Two of the hardest aspects of reading Japanese newspaper articles are reading place names and personal names. Personal names in particular are baffling, as the same set of 漢字 may have multiple pronunciations. Smith recommends using the Japanese Zip Code Lookup tool on the 日本郵便局 Web site for place name pronunciations. While that works, it should be noted you can also find place name pronunciations on Wikipedia JA; every article on a place begins with the location's pronunciation in hiragana.

You can use the same method to discover the pronunciations of names of politicians, actors/actresses, and others both famous and infamous. As for those who don't merit their own Wikipedia page, readers of NHK or FNN can usually suss out a pronunciation by watching the news clip that accompanies the article.

FYI: If your 漢字 aren't quite up to snuff, but you want to read the sample articles included in Smith's paper, use KanjiTomo, a free utility that uses OCR recognition to detect 漢字 in PDF and image files.