Some Japanese place names are transliterated to their alphabetical form using Chinese phonetic readings.

[stuartcw]

I'm scrolling around the town where I live in Japan on https://openfreemap.org and I notice that many Japanese Place names have been transliterated into alphabetical strings in the way that they would be read in Chinese.

It appears that the phonetic reading generation is being done by some automatic process which is selecting the Chinese way of transliterating them instead of the Japanese.

This is a very tricky to get right as there is no foolproof way of obtaining the phonetic reading from Japanese Kanji Characters. (Hiragana and Katakana phonetic scripts are trivial.)

Therefore, a place name in one part of Japan has one reading yet the identical place name in another part of Japan has a different phonetic reading. Even Japanese readers have to check to be sure how to read a place name that they are unfamiliar with.

Difficult place names are quite rare but mean that you have to look up whether a place name is an exception and use the correct version before using a dictionary of the common transliterations.

The current Chinese transliteration of Japanese placenames is not useful at all, actually harmful, so I would suggest turning it off until a better solution or fix is found.