Why is す transcribed /sɯ/ and not /su/?

Japanese /u/ is a high back unrounded (or compressed) vowel, written /ɯ/ in IPA, not the rounded /u/ of English. The tool uses /ɯ/ throughout for the う-row to reflect standard Tokyo Japanese.

How is the small っ (sokuon) handled?

The geminate marker doubles the following consonant onset. っか becomes /kka/ and っぱ becomes /ppa/. Before a fricative it lengthens that fricative instead.

What does ん become?

The moraic nasal ん is given as /ɴ/ in broad transcription. Its true place of articulation assimilates to the following sound, but the tool shows the underlying uvular /ɴ/ for a stable phonemic reading.

Does it mark pitch accent?

No. The tool outputs segmental IPA only. Tokyo Japanese has a high/low pitch accent, but that is lexical and not predictable from kana, so it is left unmarked.

Japanese IPA Transcription Tool

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Japanese IPA transcription maps kana morae to International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. Because the kana scripts are syllabic, transcription is largely a lookup table, but several productive rules — yōon palatalization, the geminate sokuon, long vowels, and the moraic nasal — must be resolved from surrounding context.

How it works

The transcriber normalises katakana to hiragana, then walks the string mora by mora using a lookup table built on the modern phonetic values:

う-row vowel        →  /ɯ/   (す /sɯ/, つ /tsɯ/, ふ /ɸɯ/)
し / ち / じ        →  /ɕi/ /tɕi/ /(d)ʑi/
small ゃゅょ (yōon)  →  palatalize previous onset: きゃ /kʲa/, しゃ /ɕa/
small っ (sokuon)   →  geminate the next consonant: っか /kka/
ー or vowel doubling →  long vowel /aː eː/ …
ん (moraic nasal)   →  /ɴ/

Each mora is appended in sequence; the geminate and yōon rules look ahead or behind one mora to combine with the adjacent onset.

Example and notes

がっこう (school) is /ɡakkoː/: the small っ geminates the /k/, and おう surfaces as the long /oː/. しんぶん (newspaper) gives /ɕiɴbɯɴ/, showing the /ɕ/ value of し, /ɯ/ for the う-row, and the moraic nasal /ɴ/. This is a broad phonemic transcription; allophonic nasal assimilation and pitch accent are deliberately not marked.