While Japanese names of places that are not derived from the Chinese language generally tend to represent the endonym or the English exonym as phonetically accurately as possible, the Japanese terms for some place names are obscured, either because the name was borrowed from another language or because of some other obscure etymology, such as referring to England (more specifically the United Kingdom) as イギリス (Igirisu), which is based on the Portuguese term for "English", Inglês.
The names for nations and cities that existed before major Japanese orthographic reforms in the Meiji era usually have ateji, or kanji characters used solely to represent pronunciation.
However, the use of ateji today has become far less common, as katakana has largely taken over the role of phonetically representing words of non-Sino-Japanese origin.
Bushi (ブ市) Hokkin[4]†[5] For place names derived from the Chinese language, Japanese typically uses the kanji equivalents of the Chinese characters that make up their respective endonyms, albeit with a Sino-Japanese pronunciation called on readings.
Hanōfā (ハノーファー) Atēnai (アテーナイ) Maraton (マラトン) Tēbai (テーバイ) Since India is home to many different languages and English is an official language in the country, Japanese exonyms are largely based on the English exonyms.