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Japanese writing
Components
Kanji Stroke order Radicals Jōyō kanji list Kyōiku kanji Tōyō kanji Jinmeiyō kanji Hyōgai kanji
Kana Hiragana Hentaigana Katakana Man'yōgana Sōgana Gojūon
Typographic symbols Japanese punctuation Iteration mark
Uses
Syllabograms Furigana Okurigana Braille
Transliteration
Rōmaji Hepburn Kunrei-shiki / ISO 3602 Nihon-shiki JSL Wāpuro (keyboard input)
Cyrillization Polivanov system
v t e

Wāpuro rōmaji (ワープロローマ字), orkana spelling, is a style ofromanization of Japanese originally devised forenteringJapanese intoword processors (ワードプロセッサー,wādo purosessā; oftenabbreviatedwāpuro) while using a WesternQWERTY keyboard.

In Japanese, the more formal name isrōmaji kana henkan (ローマ字仮名変換), literally "Roman character kana conversion". One conversion method has been standardized asJIS X 4063:2000 (Keystroke to KANA Transfer Method Using Latin Letter Key for Japanese Input Method); however, the standard explicitly states that it is intended as a means of input, not as a method of romanization.^[1]

Wāpuro rōmaji is now frequently employed in general-purpose computer input as well as word processing, but the name lives on. Wāpuro-style romanizations are also frequently used by native speakers of Japanese in informal contexts, as well as by many fans ofanime and other aspects ofJapanese culture^{[citation needed]}. A common characteristic of these (often online) cases is the avoidance of hard-to-type circumflexes or macrons. Also, some ambiguities in spelling may exist. Spellings are seen that would fail to produce the desired kana when typed on a computer, for example failure to distinguish betweenず (properly entered as "zu") andづ (properly entered as "du").

In practice, there are as many variants of wāpuro rōmaji as there are manufacturers of word processing and IME software. Many aspects ofHepburn,Kunrei andNihon-shiki romanizations are accepted, so that bothsi (Kunrei/Nihon-shiki) andshi (Hepburn) resolve toし. Some conventions, however, differ from standard romanizations:

• Owing to the difficulty of entering diacritics like macrons or circumflexes with standard keyboards (as well as the ambiguity of ō, etc., which in Hepburn can represent eitherおう orおお)long vowels are almost universally entered followingkana spelling rules; thus,kou forこう andkoo forこお.
• The Nihon-shiki forms of romanization take precedence over other romanizations. Thusdu usually producesづ rather thanどぅ.
• Small kana can be entered by prefacing them with anx orl, e.g.xa forぁ, orltu forっ. This is commonly employed for modernkatakana combinations likeティ, which would be entered astexi,thi, ort'i. However, on some systemsl is treated the same asr when followed by a vowel or "y".
• じゃ,じゅ andじょ may also be romanized asjya,jyu andjyo respectively. This matches the kana closely, but is used by neither Nihon-shiki/Kunrei (which would bezya, zyu, zyo) nor Hepburn (ja, ju, jo).
• The Hepburn spellingtchi forっち may be rejected, andtti orcchi may be required instead.
• The Hepburn spellingmma is likely to be renderedっま, not the intendedんま (nma). This is not an issue for revised Hepburn, which eliminates the-mm- forms in favor of-nm-.
• Moraicn,ん, can be entered asnn,n orn'. While moraicn can be typed in simply asn in some cases, in other cases it is necessary to type in a non-ambiguous form to prevent the IME from interpreting then as belonging to a kana from thena column (なna,にni,ぬnu,ねne,のno).
• Phonetic names can often be used forJapanese typographic symbols not found on standard keyboards. For example, in some IMEs ～ can be entered asnami (wave) orkara (from) and an ellipsis (...) can be entered astenten (point point).

Unlike Kunrei and Hepburn, the wāpuro style is based on a one-to-onetranscription of thekana.^[1] Wāpuro thus does not represent some distinctions observed in spoken Japanese, but not in writing, such as the difference between/oː/ (long vowel) and/oɯ/ (o+u). For example, in standard Japanese the kanaおう can be pronounced in two different ways: as/oː/ meaning "king" (王),^[2] and as/oɯ/ meaning "to chase" (追う).^[3] Kunrei and Hepburn spell the two differently asô/ō andou, because the former is a long vowel while the latter has ano that happens to be followed by au; however, wāpuro style simply transcribes the kana and renders them both asou. Likewise, the irregularly spelled particleswa (は),e (へ) ando (を) must be entered as written (ha,he andwo respectively), not as pronounced (unlike Kunrei and Hepburn, which transcribe the pronunciation).

• Japanese language and computers
• Pinyin input method

• Romanization of Japanese
• Japanese writing system

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