What 熱海海星 means: umihoshi, not hitode

Write 海星 in Japanese and almost everyone reads it hitode: starfish. The characters mean 'sea' and 'star', and hitode is one of those readings you simply have to know. So the first thing Japanese guests often ask us is whether we're 'Atami Hitode'.

We aren't. We read our name umihoshi: umi, the sea, and hoshi, the star. 熱海海星 is Atami Umihoshi. On Japanese signs and pages we add the reading, あたみ うみほし, in small kana the first time the name appears, so nobody has to guess.

Why the sea and the star

Everything at this house happens between the two. In the afternoon the bay fills the windows. On about fifteen nights a year, fireworks go up over the water at 20:20. After the town goes quiet, on clear nights, the stars come out over the same sea. Our master line, Stay until the sea turns to stars, is the whole idea of the house in one sentence. In Japanese it's 海が、星になるまで。

The starfish is welcome too

We don't mind the double meaning. A starfish is a sea star, after all, and a cheerful thing to find on a beach. In Chinese, 熱海海星 reads as 'Atami starfish', which is charming and easy to remember, so we keep the characters as they are.

The mark

Our logo is a sea star rising over three lines of calm water, held in a ring. The ring comes from kamon, the Japanese family crests, so the mark can work as a seal on the gate, a stamp on paper or embroidery on a yukata. The star has five soft arms with a slight curl, so it reads as a living sea star rather than a generic star, and it's five-fold like the plum-blossom crest, a nod to Atami's winter plum. It floats above the water and never touches it: that gap is the moment the sea turns to stars. The same star dots the i of Atami in our name.

How to say it

A-ta-mi U-mi-ho-shi. Every syllable is even, with no heavy stress. In Latin letters we always write it as two words, both capitalised: Atami Umihoshi.