Japanese OCR — Extract Japanese Text From Any Image
Upload an image containing Japanese and get editable text back, with kanji, hiragana and katakana all preserved as written. Useful for study material, manga, product packaging and screenshots where the text can't be selected.
Drop your image here
or click to browse — JPG, PNG, WEBP, GIF…
Upload an image and click Extract Text
All readable text from the image will appear here.
What Makes Japanese OCR Difficult
Japanese mixes three writing systems in a single sentence, and an OCR model has to switch between them mid-line: kanji carrying meaning, hiragana for grammar, katakana for loanwords. The hard part is that several pairs are near-identical across systems — ロ (katakana ro) versus 口 (the kanji for mouth), or リ versus 利, or ー versus 一. Small kana used as furigana reading aids sit directly above kanji and frequently get spliced into the main text as noise. Japanese also writes without spaces, and manga and novels are often set vertically, right-to-left, with text wrapped inside irregular speech bubbles.
Getting Accurate Japanese Results
- If the page has furigana, expect small kana to be interleaved into the output. Cropping tightly to the main text line reduces this.
- For manga, process one speech bubble at a time. Whole-page captures mix up reading order badly because panels flow right-to-left.
- Vertical text works but horizontal is more dependable — if a vertical capture scrambles, crop single columns.
- Katakana loanwords and long vowel marks (ー) are a common error source; proofread product names and foreign words.
Who Uses Japanese OCR
Japanese learners
Copy kanji off signs, menus and textbook pages to look up readings, build Anki decks or check grammar you can't type.
Manga and media
Extract dialogue from scanned panels and screenshots for study, reference or translation drafts.
Product and import data
Pull specifications, ingredients and model numbers off Japanese packaging, manuals and spec sheets.
Japanese OCR — Frequently Asked Questions
Does it recognise kanji, hiragana and katakana together?▼
Yes — all three in a single pass, which is what normal Japanese text requires. The output keeps each character as written, so grammar particles in hiragana and loanwords in katakana come through alongside the kanji.
Can it read vertical Japanese text?▼
Usually, though horizontal text is more reliable. Vertical right-to-left layout is standard in novels and manga. If the reading order comes back wrong, crop individual columns or bubbles and process them separately.
What happens to furigana?▼
Small reading aids above kanji are sometimes extracted as part of the text, which can look like stray kana inserted mid-sentence. Cropping closer to the main line usually avoids it, or you can simply delete the extras after extraction.
Does it work on manga scans?▼
Yes, best bubble by bubble. A full page contains multiple panels read right-to-left, and extracting everything at once tends to interleave dialogue from different panels in the wrong order.
Need a Translation Instead?
This page extracts Japanese text as written. If you want the meaning in another language, the image translator reads the text and translates it in one step.
OCR in Other Languages
Or use the general image to text converter if your image contains several languages at once.