Pronunciation Irks Angelenos Named Nagano

You say “toe-MAY-toe,” I say “toe-MAH-toe.”

And they say “NAHG-a-no,” we say “nah-GAH-no.”

That’s the mournful tune being sung in Nagano-surnamed households across Los Angeles this week as the Winter Olympics from Nagano, Japan, are beamed into living rooms all over town.

Japanese Americans whose last name is Nagano say that television commentators from the Olympic site are mispronouncing their name.

Naganos, who put the accent on the second syllable, say that they have complained everywhere from the Japanese Consulate to local television stations. But like the skiing competition, things just keep going downhill.

“I just think, ‘There they go again!’ when I hear it on TV,” Vickie Nagano of Torrance said with a shrug. “They’ve got it all wrong. I grew up in Japan. I speak the language.”

Broadcast reporters are pronouncing the name of the city hosting the Winter Games as “NAHG-a-no.”

Local Nagano families have long pronounced their name “nah-GAH-no.”

They say that their way is the right way.

“I cringe every time I hear them say it on television,” said Steve Nagano, a teacher who lives in Torrance. His friends and his students at Bancroft Middle School in Long Beach are getting a big laugh out of his discomfort, he said.

“My friends tell me I’ve been mispronouncing my name all my life,” Nagano said. “My students are giving it to me all the time.”

Local Naganos--some of whom can trace their ancestry to the Nagano prefecture of central Japan--say that they sensed something was wrong when the first promotional announcements for the Winter Olympics began popping up on CBS.

Thomas K. Nagano, a bartender and artist who lives in Little Tokyo, was appalled to hear his name butchered.

“I think I know what happened. I think they used an East Coast announcer to record the spots,” Nagano speculated Wednesday. “And by the time they found out he was saying it wrong, it was too late to change them. So they just adopted that pronunciation for everyone.”

Joe Nagano, a retired water reclamation lab director from West Los Angeles, said he complained to the local CBS outlet, KCBS-TV Channel 2.

“I called up Jim Hill on television and told him, ‘I love your sportscast, but I think you’re pronouncing the name wrong.’ He said that was the order from headquarters in New York, so they had to do it that way.”

Nagano said even newscaster Tritia Toyota--a Japanese American--has gotten it wrong.

“She goes back and forth. Sometimes she says it the right way, then she goes back to the company way,” he said. “I’m 77 years old. This is the first time I’ve heard this pronunciation. It kind of irritates me.”

A CBS spokesman in Nagano said the goal of all 40 announcers and commentators at the Games is to be consistent.

Officials at the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles said they have been flooded by complaints.

But they said an informal poll of workers at the consulate suggested that Nagano (which means “long field” in Japanese) can be pronounced both ways, although most placed a light stress on the first syllable. It can even be said a third way, depending on the Japanese regional dialect.

The first pronunciation given by the Kenkyusha dictionary, a standard Japanese reference work, stresses the first syllable. “It’s linguistically a stress shifted word,” said consulate staff member Miriam Stenshoel.

The consulate seemed surprised by the local flap.

Michihiko Komatsu, a Japanese consul, said each syllable is usually accented equally in the Japanese language.

“I think both [pronunciations] are acceptable for the Japanese people,” Komatsu said.

Komatsu acknowledged, however, that the “American people cannot pronounce it correctly in their language.”

The reason, said CBS network sports spokesman Dana McClintock, is that “in Japanese they accentuate all syllables equally. But Americans don’t speak like that.

“You wouldn’t want the flow broken up by somebody saying, ‘It’s great to be in ‘nah-gah-no,’ ” he said, mimicking a flat, accentless delivery.

“We decided, if anything, to accentuate the first syllable. We’ve chosen to have consistency.” McClintock said the network’s pronunciation sounds the closest to the way Japanese in Nagano pronounce it.

Lori Nagano, an occupational therapist from Alhambra, said she cringed when she first heard the television pronunciation. But “my 7-year-old daughter laughs when she hears it,” she said.

Nagano said she’s happy to be a “nah-GAH-no.”

“We’ll definitely not be changing the pronunciation of our name,” she said.

Times staff writer Mike Kupper contributed to this story.