Hiragana is one of Japan’s two kana syllabaries, used for native vocabulary, grammar particles, verb endings, and pronunciation guides. Each character stands for a syllable, so converting between Hiragana and the Latin alphabet is a matter of mapping syllable to syllable. This free tool applies the standard Hepburn romanisation in both directions, instantly and with no upload.
How it works
Going from Hiragana to Romaji, the tool reads the longest matching unit first so that contracted sounds (yōon) like きゃ are read as a single syllable kya rather than kiya. The small っ (sokuon) is detected and converted by doubling the consonant that follows it, turning がっこう into gakkou. Long vowels and the syllabic ん are handled by direct mapping.
Going from Romaji to Hiragana, the tool greedily matches the longest valid syllable at each position — so shi, chi, tsu, kya, and nn are recognised before single letters. A doubled consonant such as the kk in gakkou is turned back into a small っ followed by か, and trailing n becomes ん.
Tips and notes
Hepburn writes certain syllables phonetically: し is shi, じ is ji, ち is chi, つ is tsu, and ふ is fu. When typing Romaji, use those spellings for the cleanest round-trip. Characters the table does not recognise — kanji, punctuation, and spaces — pass through unchanged. Everything runs locally in your browser, so your text is never sent to a server.