The two first /o/s are borrowed as /a/ in Japanese. I don't understand why the
Russian /o/ vowel sounds like /a/ to Japanese speakers instead of /o/ which is
a phoneme in Japanese.
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loanwords
Why would Russian хорошо [xoroʂo] be borrowed as ハラショー?
First of all, loanwords are only _based_ on a word in a different language;
they do not have to be duplicates. Russian and Japanese are different
languages, especially in terms of pronunciation, so not everything will go
between them smoothly.

I am not an expert in the Russian language, but if I remember correctly, the
letter 'o' sounds like an unstressed 'a' (or a schwa) when it is unstressed,
and when it _is_ stressed, it sounds like an 'o' as usual. According to
dictionaries, the word 'хорошо' has stress on the last 'o', so the last one
will sound like an 'o' but the first two, which are unstressed, will sound
sort of like an 'a'. That could explain why the first two are borrowed as /a/
but the last is an /o/.

So it sounds like /a/ to Japanese speakers because that's pretty much what it
is.
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Because хорошо is pronounced just like ハラショ.

[http://ja.forvo.com/word/хорошо/](http://ja.forvo.com/word/%D1%85%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%BE/)
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This probably belongs to the Russian Language SE, but it is due to
palatalization.

This site has a brief intro to pronunciation:
<http://www.russianlessons.net/lessons/lesson1_main.php>

When stressed, it is an "oh" sound and when unstressed is it an "ah" sound.

Japanese language tends to transcribe words as they sound, thus ハラショー
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@macraf: хорошо in IPA is xərɐˈʂo. – Oct 24 '15 at 0:02

Maybe.

@blavius: it is due to palatalization.

Not so simple. The first consideration is stress. Unstressed /o/ and /a/ merge
to /a/. (Akanye vs. okanye.)

The choice of allophone then brings in other factors.

• [ɐ] (or [ʌ]) for the syllable preceding the stressed one. (Further reduction
less likely.)

• [ə] (the most frequent vowel in English) for other unstressed syllables.

For more phonetic detail than you may want or ever need to know

<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_reduction_in_Russian>
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