In Japanese, the mora nasal is realized phonetically as various sounds, but phonologically it is treated as a nasal that constitutes a mora[25]. For instance, a word like hoN (book), the nasal appears as a wide variety of sounds. A few possibilities are illustrated by the examples as follows:
| (1) hoN mo (book too) | (2) hoN da (is book) | |
| (3) hoN ni (in book) | (4) hoN ka (book?) |
In each case, we find a long, unreleased nasal, but the place of articulation varies widely. In general, when a nasal precedes a consonant that begins with a complete oral closure (i.e., a plosive, affricate, or nasal), the nasal is long and unreleased and has an identical closure. When the following consonant is a nasal, as in (1) and (3), the result is phonetically a long, uninterrupted, intervocalic nasal. When the following consonant is an obstruent, as in (2) and (4), the velum is raised before the closure is released, but the closure itself is uniform throughout. It was found that its durations also followed the manner of articulation from Figure 5.7. But the effect of its preceding vowel was not so clear.
