Japan can be slow but it’s worth waiting for. In a move that’s long overdue, the Japanese government is finally preparing to ditch its old romanization system for the Japanese language in favor of the de facto international standard – and the standard that, in reality, most of the government actually uses.
Abandoning a system no one uses
Jiji reports that Japan may finally carry through on a years-long threat to abandon the native Kunrei-shiki system of romanization, the current official standard, in favor of the modified Hepburn romanization system created by James Curtis Hepburn in 1867.
The Romanization Subcommittee of the Agency of Cultural Affairs had previously accepted public comment on this change in January, according to Asahi Shimbun. It plans to submit its report for debate in April, having reached broad agreement on what the switch would entail.
Japan first adopted the Kunrei-shiki system by Cabinet Order in 1937 and then again in the post-war government in 1954. The system feels unnatural to native English speakers, as many romanizations don’t correspond to their actual sounds in Japanese. For example, under the Kunrei-shiki, the sound ち is romanized as ti, し is romanized as si, and じゅ is romanized as zyu. That means that, in Kunrei-shiki, “Shinjuku” is properly romanized as Sinzyuku, Aichi as Aiti, and shimbun (newspaper) as sinbun.
What’s funny is that, despite being the official romanization system, few institutions use it. The National Diet Library uses it, and it’s used in elementary schools and textbooks. However, most government and private organizations use Hepburn, and most public signs are written in Hepburn as well. The legal change would merely reflect reality.
Hepburn rules
The Subcommittee’s recommendations try to thread a needle between shifting to modified Hepburn while recognizing historical precedents and exceptions.
Under modified Hepburn, for example, Japanese’s syllabic ん sound would normally be written as n when it butts up against another consonant – e.g., Shinbashi for 新橋. However, in traditional Hepburn, the n becomes m before a vowel. The proposed rules would recognize the traditional Hepburn rule in words where it’s become commonplace – notably the word “newspaper,” which most Japanese newspapers romanize as shimbun in their English language names. (In Kunrei-shiki, it’s written as n’ before vowels and n otherwise.)
The rules would also allow for long consonant flexibility. For example, the name 大江戸 (おおえど) would be romanized in most cases using a macron over the o – i.e., Ōedo. However, it would also allow for the use of double consonants (Ooedo) in cases where a macron can’t be used. Kunrei-shiki denotes long vowels with a circumflex accent (Ôedo).
These guidelines would remain loose, however, to deal with the many exceptions that have developed in recent years – e.g., the name of Japan’s most famous baseball player, 大谷翔平 (おおたにしょうへい), who romanizes his last name as Ohtani, or the word judo (柔道; じゅうどう), whose long vowels aren’t rendered in Latin characters at all.
Japan’s own writing system, as we’ve discussed at length, is a mixture of kanji adopted from China and the kanji-derived hiragana and katakana syllabaries. Some groups in Japan have fought to change it over the centuries but to no avail. One group campaigned for years for Japan to move to the Latin alphabet – a Quixotic crusade it only abandoned in 2023.
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