How to use Japanese to romaji
- 1
Type or paste the Japanese
Enter a name as it appears on your documents, in kanji or kana, with a space between surname and given name; kana convert at once.
- 2
Read the kanji
Press Read the kanji to download the dictionary once (17.8 MB), then check each word's reading and fix any that is wrong.
- 3
Pick the spelling
Choose Passport for passports and visas, Hepburn for macrons or Kunrei-shiki, then set the name order and capitals.
- 4
Copy the result
Copy the romaji or save it as a text file; in passport mode, look over the rules applied and the character count first.
Limits and Pro
Free with no sign-up: kana convert instantly at any length, and the dictionary reads up to 50,000 characters of text with kanji at a time.
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About Japanese to romaji
Passport applications, airline bookings, visa forms and English-only websites all ask for a Japanese name in Latin letters, and each expects the same spelling every time. This converter turns hiragana and katakana into romaji as you type, and reads kanji with an open-source Japanese dictionary when you ask it to.
Passport mode follows the Hepburn rules that Japan's passport offices publish: capital letters, ん written M before B, M and P (SHIMBASHI, NAMBA), っ doubling the next consonant with T before CH (HATTORI, HATCHO), and long vowels left out (おおの ONO, さとう SATO, ゆうこ YUKO), except a name-final おお as in よこお YOKOO. It counts the 37 characters a passport has room for, and writes a long O as OH if you have asked the passport office for that spelling. Hepburn mode adds macrons and apostrophes (Tōkyō, kōhī, kin'en); Kunrei-shiki gives the school spelling (Tôkyô, Huzisan).
Kanji have many readings, and names more than most: 菅野 can be Kanno or Sugano. Once the dictionary has read your text, each kanji word is listed with its reading, the other readings it knows and a box for typing the right one. When two vowels only look like a long vowel because they belong to different kanji, as in 井上 INOUE or 松浦 MATSUURA, both letters are kept, and you can mark any other pair yourself.
The tool cannot know the reading registered for your name, so check it against your family register or an earlier passport before you submit anything.
Privacy
Kana are converted by the page itself, and kanji by a copy of the kuromoji dictionary running in a background worker on your device, so your text is never sent anywhere. The only download is the 17.8 MB dictionary from the jsDelivr CDN, which your browser keeps in its cache until you remove it. Your text, settings and corrected readings are saved in this browser's local storage.
Features
Passport Hepburn
M before B, M and P, TCH, long vowels left out and the 37-character limit, as passport offices apply them.
Readings you can fix
Every kanji word shows its reading and the alternatives, so a misread name is put right with one tap.
Dictionary on your device
kuromoji with IPADIC reads kanji in your browser; download it once and it keeps working offline.
Furigana as well
Switch to Furigana for readings in hiragana or katakana, as 漢字(かな) or as HTML ruby.