Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years
47 comments
·December 16, 2025phantasmish
lbotos
Elaborate? I’m not following.
rfarley04
I live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is (seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses different English spelling of Thai words.
kazinator
In the first place, "romanization" of English is unstandardized! Or was that unstandardised?
adastra22
It tends to be standardized within a single country.
kazinator
[delayed]
merelysounds
Standardizations can be notoriously inconsistent[1], disregarded[2] or evolve fast[3].
There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re...
qingcharles
Whoosh :)
WalterBright
Please bring back Fraktur.
kazinator
Hepburn is poorly supported in some input methods, like on Windows. If you want to type kōen or whatever, you really have to work for that ō. It's better now on mobile devices and MacOS (what I'm using now): I just long-pressed o and picked ō from a pop-up.
Etheryte
That's one aspect I really love about macOS. I'm from a small country so nearly no one makes hardware with our exact layout, but with macOS I can always just long press to fill in the gaps. I just wish all apps used native inputs, not some weird half-baked solution they built themselves.
qingcharles
What's the best way to type Japanese on Windows? (I have a QWERTY keyboard)
On mobile I just switch to the hiragana keyboard, but that obviously isn't a sane option on desktop unless I'm clicking all the characters with a mouse?
junar
Using the example from the top-level comment, you would install an IME, switch to hiragana mode, start typing "kouen" and convert to kanji when you see the right suggestion.
It might sound complicated at first, but you can do it pretty fast once you get used to it.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/input/japane...
kazinator
[delayed]
johnea
Hepburn also allows the use of the double vowel, in this case: kooen
adastra22
Is that part of Hepburn? It is not mentioned in the article, nor by most explainers that I’m familiar with.
null
QuercusMax
The article says the new style says that you can use either a macron or a doubled letter, but it's not clear if that's supported for keyboard input on various platforms.
bitwize
Compose o dash. Windows doesn't have an easy way to map in the compose key (usually ralt)?
big if true, jesus christ microsoft
Lammy
https://github.com/ell1010/wincompose is like the first thing I install on any new Windows machine.
bryanlarsen
Note: bitwize is talking about how to do it on Linux. Which is the best way in my biased opinion. Perhaps not the best mapping for people who use it regularly but is awesome for those who use it irregularly. We can usually guess how to do weird diacritics without having to look it up.
gpvos
Nope. When on Windows I tend to use one of the US International or the Pseudo VT320 layout from https://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ .
qingcharles
They need to do the same for a bunch of languages, e.g. Arabic.
Theofrastus
I'm honestly surprised Hepburn wasn't the official standard yet. It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.
> The council’s recommendation also adopts Hepburn spellings for し, じ and つ as shi, ji, and tsu, compared to the Kunrei spellings of si, zi and tu.
I could imagine si, zi and tu sound closer to the spoken sounds to Mandarin speakers.
wyan
Not closer to the spoken sounds, closer to English orthography.
mono442
It works better with other European languages' orthography too.
Theofrastus
Native German speaker here. It fits very well here, too
shikon7
You mean, if you would apply the inverse of the standard romanization of Mandarin, the resulting sound would be closer to the Japanese sound, if starting from the Kunrei spelling than if starting from the Hepburn spelling?
usrnm
The popularity of Hepburn has a lot more to do with the English language than the Japanese language
ranger_danger
> It sounds way closer to the spoken sounds, at least to my western ears.
That's the thing... to some other non-English language speakers, the existing/old romanization method actually is more accurate regarding how the letters would be pronounced to them, especially coming from languages that don't have the same e.g. [ch] or [ts] sounds as written with Hepburn.
The one technical downside I would say to this change is, 1:1 machine transliteration is no longer possible with Hepburn.
mytailorisrich
I don't know the details history of the system's development, however I notice that with Kunrei everything spelling is neatly 2 characters while with Hepburn it may be 2 or 3 characters:
Kunrei: ki si ti ni hi mi
Hepburn: ki shi chi ni hi mi
The politics of the issue is obviously that Hepburn is older and an American system while Nihon and Kunrei are very purposely domestic (Nihon "is much more regular than Hepburn romanization, and unlike Hepburn's system, it makes no effort to make itself easier to pronounce for English-speakers" [1]). Apparently, Hepburn was later imposed by US occupying forces in 1945.
Perhaps 80 years is long enough and suitable to effect the change officially with no loss of face.
jinushaun
Politics aside, Hepburn is better. You can’t seriously say you prefer “konniti-ha” and “susi-wo tabemasu”
JuniperMesos
"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
xigoi
Should we also change other languages’ orthographies to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers? “Bonzhoor” instead of “Bonjour”?
Theofrastus
The political aspect might be a big part of why and how the systems are chosen. Didn't know about that!
ChrisArchitect
Previously in 2024 (?):
dang
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
English-friendly Romanization system proposed for Japanese language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42606969 - Jan 2025 (23 comments)
Japan to revise official romanization rules for first time in 70 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624972 - March 2024 (97 comments)
Oh no.
This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.