Hepburn Romanization: How to Read Japanese in the Latin Alphabet
13th September 2026
If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
The reason why Japanese people don’t use something like this is that the language contains an obscene amount of homophones, and kanji allow one to nail down the precise meaning without having to depend on vague contextual clues or tedious periphrasis.
(English is just the opposite—it has an excess of what one might call ‘heterophones’, words that mean pretty much the same thing but look and sound entirely different. Of course, if you try to use different heterophones to express different nuances of meaning it brings out the Humpty-Dumpty My Way Or The Highway linguistic hatermongers.)