Hepburn romanization

The system was originally published in 1867 by American Christian missionary and physician James Curtis Hepburn as the standard in the first edition of his Japanese–English dictionary.

It is learned by most foreign students of the language, and is used within Japan for romanizing personal names, locations, and other information, such as train tables and road signs.

[1] In 1867, American Presbyterian missionary doctor James Curtis Hepburn published the first Japanese–English dictionary, in which he introduced a new system for the romanization of Japanese into Latin script.

[5] However, the notation requires further explanation for accurate pronunciation by non-Japanese speakers: for example, the syllables [ɕi] and [tɕa], which are written as shi and cha in Hepburn, are rendered as si and tya in Nihon-shiki.

[4] After Nihon-shiki was presented to the Rōmaji-kai in 1886, a dispute began between the supporters of the two systems, which resulted in a standstill and an eventual halt to the organization's activities in 1892.

[5] The Commission eventually decided on a slightly modified "compromise" version of Nihon-shiki, which was chosen for official use by cabinet ordinance on September 21, 1937; this system is known today as Kunrei-shiki romanization.

[14] In January 2024, the Cultural Affairs Agency proposed revising the 1954 Cabinet ordinance to make Hepburn the standard romanization system of Japan.

More technically, when syllables that are constructed systematically according to the Japanese syllabary contain an "unstable" consonant in the modern spoken language, the orthography is changed to something that better matches the real sound as an English-speaker would pronounce it.

Some linguists such as Harold E. Palmer, Daniel Jones and Otto Jespersen object to Hepburn, contending that the pronunciation-based spellings can obscure the systematic origins of Japanese phonetic structures, inflections, and conjugations.