Why is there a "tsu" in Nippon (にっぽん)? > **Possible Duplicate:** > How did "little tsu" become a lengthener? On Wikipedia and elsewhere, Japan is written like so: Nippon ( ). What is that tsu doing in there? Why isn't it represented in the romaji rendering of the name?

The character you're talking about is commonly referred to as "little " and looks like . This characters is not actually pronounced, but rather it means to take a small pause.

In the case of , instead of pronouncing it as "nitsupon", you would be pronouncing it like "ni [small pause] pon" which is romanised as "nippon" which has a natural pause between the two 'p's.

But like sawa said in a comment, this is a very basic thing in Japanese and you would have learnt this from a textbook's first chapter.

For a more complete explanation though, you can visit the wikipedia page on it.