The author of your article: https://soranews24.com/2016/12/01/w-t-f-japan-top-5-most-insane-kanji-place-names-in-japan%E3%80%90weird-top-five%E3%80%91/ https:/

The author of your article: https://soranews24.com/2016/12/01/w-t-f-japan-top-5-most-insane-kanji-place-names-in-japan%E3%80%90weird-top-five%E3%80%91/ https://soranews24.com/2016/12/01/w-t-f-japan-top-5-most-ins... seems to be unaware of the existence of jukujikun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukujikun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jukujikun They don't seem to understand how kanji work in general (kanji are symbols, not phonemes; they're more like numerals or emoji than letters). It's as if the article were saying: "If 1 is pronounced 'one', why is 11 pronounced 'eleven'? My dictionary doesn't list 'ele' OR 'ven' as a valid pronunciation of 1!" While jukujikun are really common in names (including place names and person names), they're not specific to names. For instance, 啄木鳥 (kera) meaning "woodpecker" is more kanji than syllables, and 今日 (kyou) meaning "today" is also jukujikun. Jukujikun need to be learned like any other word (you're not going to be able to read it correctly the first time you see it, but that goes for any other kanji reading you've never seen before), but they would not surprise a native Japanese speaker ("today" is not a rare word in Japanese).