For those that know Japanese. I lived in Japan for a while and studied abit of Japanese but my level is pretty poor.
山の瀬
Obviously Yama is mountain, but my question is around the "no". It seems unusual to me a placename has that hiragana no, as I thought implied ownership. Or am I wrong?
In Tokyo, there is Takadanobaba, but it has its own Kanji IIRC
The interesting thing about Takadanobaba (高田馬場), other than that I'm pretty sure it exists to make fun of a young woman with the family name of Takada--I know I made fun of her for it--is that the 'no' doesn't actually appear in the name. If you read it literally, it would be 'Takada-baba.' It also happens to be on the Yamanote line, which is written in the same way (山手線). If you read that literally, it would be 'yama-te sen.' I don't really know how to explain why this is, but it is. Functionally, it's the same thing as Yama-no-se. 'No' is possessive, but it's literally 'of.'
I don't really know how to describe 'se' (瀬) in English. I'm not sure it exactly translates, but it's sort of like a less dramatic rip tide along a river, or a strong river current. So, Yama-no-se is essentially '(that--as in the previous description of 'se')
of the mountains,' or, if you wanted to make it more clearly possessive, 'the mountain
's (that).'
This might sound funky, but if I were actually going to translate Yama-no-se, it would probably be as 'river-surge of mountains' (we'll pretend the first bit is something an English speaker would ever say). It's a subtle difference, and it's one of those subtleties that comes with time, but in this instance it's less about the possessive, and more about ascribing an affect to "mountains," because it's sort of an abstract name. Ultimately it's a place name, though, and most people wouldn't think that much about it anymore than an English speaker would think about the name, "Johnsonville."
Hope that helps at all.