Kanji to Romaji Converter
Your text is converted in your browser and never sent to our server. The dictionary itself downloads once from a CDN.
Paste Japanese text above and it comes back in romaji — Latin letters, spaced into words, with long vowels marked the way textbooks and street signs mark them. The tool reads each word in context, so 今日 comes out as kyō, not as two characters glued together.
This tool uses Hepburn romanization
There are two romanization systems you will meet in the wild, and they disagree about some syllables:
| Kana | Hepburn (this tool) | Kunrei-shiki |
|---|---|---|
| し | shi | si |
| ち | chi | ti |
| つ | tsu | tu |
| ふ | fu | hu |
| じ | ji | zi |
Hepburn is what English speakers see everywhere — passports, train stations, textbooks, sushi menus. Kunrei-shiki is taught inside Japanese schools but rarely used for foreign readers. If you are writing Japanese words for an English-speaking audience, Hepburn is the right choice, which is why it is the only system this tool outputs.
What the bar over vowels means
The macron (ō, ū) marks a long vowel — a sound held for two beats instead of one. 東京 is Tōkyō: four beats, two of them long. This is not decoration; おじさん (ojisan, uncle) and おじいさん (ojīsan, grandfather) are different words separated only by vowel length.
English publications usually drop the macrons — that is why you see "Tokyo" in newspapers. Fine for city names everyone knows; risky for words your reader has never met. If you are transcribing Japanese for learning or for print, keep the macrons.
Where the spaces come from
Japanese is written without spaces, so the word boundaries in the output are the tool's analysis, not something in the original text. We space the way romanized Japanese is conventionally printed: particles separate (Tōkyō ni ikimasu), verb endings joined (ikimasu, not iki masu), names capitalized.
The honest limits
- Personal names are guesses. The reading of a Japanese name cannot be determined from its kanji alone — 裕子 might be Yūko or Hiroko. Verify names with their owner, or ask us.
- Words outside the dictionary get split and romanized piece by piece, which can produce readings no native speaker would choose.
Related tools
- Learning to read kana? Convert the same text to hiragana instead of romaji.
- Want your own name in Japanese? That is the English to katakana converter.
FAQ
Why do I see "wa" where the text has は?
The particle は is written ha but pronounced wa, and romaji follows pronunciation. Same for を (o) and へ (e). The tool handles this automatically because it knows which words are particles.
Why not "toukyou" like my IME types it?
That spelling (wāpuro-style) exists to type Japanese on a keyboard — it maps keystrokes to kana. It was never meant to show pronunciation to a reader. Tōkyō tells an English speaker how the word sounds; toukyou tells a computer which kana to produce. Different jobs.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The analysis runs in your browser. The only download is the dictionary itself, once, from a CDN.