Help with Japanese pronunciation?

I took Japanese for several semesters, and you're instincts and pronunciation are correct. I don't know where that "'o' as in 'fort'" thing comes from, but it's WRONG. Listen to your Japanese teachers or native speakers for Japanese, not the History teacher. History teachers tend to be the kind of guys who either purposely pronounce all foreign names the way Archie Bunker would, OR they patronizingly toss out all English phonology and make a point of pronouncing all foreign names/words as they would be pronounced in the originating nation. Either way, it's annoying. And wrong. I wouldn't become the person who runs around correcting every non-Japanese person's pronunciation of words like "sushi" and "Tokyo", etc., though. Once words get adopted into a language, they are churned through the phonetic system of the adoptive language--just like the Japanese words written in katakana; they may be foreign words, but they're pronounced in a Japanese way.