About Proper Kanji

Most of the kanji you see on shirts, prints, and skin outside Japan was chosen by matching sounds. Nobody checked what the characters actually say.

That is how someone ends up with 麺 — noodle — on their forearm for the rest of their life.

Proper Kanji exists to fix one narrow problem. If you want your name, or a word that matters to you, written in Japanese, then someone who actually reads Japanese should choose the characters — and you should be able to see why they were chosen.

Who runs this

My name is Kei Yoshimura. I live in Tokyo and I run Keys Inc., a company based in Nihonbashi. Japanese is my first language, and I have spent the last several years building reference sites in it.

The characters this site can use, and the rules for combining them, were chosen by a native speaker. When a tool here suggests a spelling for your name, it is drawing from a set that has already been filtered — and it shows you the reasoning, so you can judge the result yourself instead of trusting a black box.

Why sound alone is not enough

Japanese has thousands of characters that can carry the same sound. Picking one at random gets you something pronounceable and, often, something absurd.

Take the sound ma. It can be written 真 (true), 麻 (hemp), 磨 (to polish), or 魔 (demon). All four are correct as sounds. Only some of them belong in a person's name, and a Japanese reader can tell instantly which is which.

That instinct is what this site is built to lend you.

What this site is not

• Not a dictionary. If you want to look up a character you already have, use a proper dictionary. We are here to help you choose one you don't have yet.
• Not a document translation service. We work at the level of names, words, and short phrases.
• Not a machine that flatters you. If a character looks striking but reads badly to a Japanese person, we will say so rather than sell it to you.

A note on getting it permanent

If you are planning a tattoo, please do not treat any free tool — ours included — as the final word. Read the explanation, understand what each character carries, and if it still matters to you after that, ask a second Japanese reader before the needle comes out. Nothing on this page is worth a permanent mistake.

Company

Keys Inc.
1-11-12 Nihombashimuromachi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 103-0022, Japan
Contact us