A strange aspect of written Japanese is that many Japanese people cannot read their own language. While the vast majority of Japanese can read the 2136 joyo or "general use kanji" (the standard characters all Japanese must learn by the time they graduate from high school in order to be considered literate), there are many very difficult characters that fall outside of the "official" lists, and thus, many people aren't sure how to pronounce them. Family names are notoriously difficult to read, and the kanji for my wife's family's name -- Yanai -- is read as "Yanagi" in almost every other part of Japan besides our city, which means she's constantly correcting people about what her name is. Place names are also very difficult for Japanese to read, unless they happened to grow up in that area. In the aftermath of the terrible March 11 earthquake and tsunamis, it was common to see newscasters from Tokyo reading off lists of cities and towns in rural parts of the country, yet they were unable to correctly read the kanji place names and kept stumbling, apologizing to the viewers for getting them wrong.
It's not uncommon for Japanese to be unable to read unique kanji names.
