Despite its official recognition, the Japanese commonly choose between , and
Hepburn systems for any given situation. However, the Japanese government generally uses Hepburn, especially for passports, road signage, Most Western publications, as well, and all English-language newspapers use some form of Hepburn. J. Marshall Unger, the author of
Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading between the Lines, said that the Hepburn supporters "understandably" believed that the "compromise" was not fair because of the presence of the "un-English-looking spellings" that the Modified Hepburn supporters had opposed. Andrew Horvat, the author of
Japanese Beyond Words: How to Walk and Talk Like a Native Speaker, argued that "by forcing non-native speakers of Japanese with no intentions of learning the language to abide by a system intended for those who have some command of Japanese, the government gave the impression of intolerant language management that would have dire consequences later on." Additional complications appear with newer kana combinations such as
team. In Hepburn, they would be distinguished as different sounds and represented as
tīmu and
chīmu respectively. That gives better indications of the English pronunciations. For some Japanese-speakers, however, the sounds "ti" and "chi" are the same phoneme; both are represented in as
tîmu. Such complications may be confusing to those who do not know Japanese phonology well. Use of an apostrophe (t'îmu), sometimes seen in , may be a possible solution. Today, the main users of are native speakers of Japanese, especially within Japan, and
linguists studying Japanese. The main advantage of is that it is better able to illustrate
Japanese grammar, as Hepburn gives the impression of certain conjugations being irregular (see table, right). The most serious problem of Hepburn in this context is that it may change the
stem of a
verb, which is not reflected in the underlying
morphology of the language. One notable introductory textbook for English-speakers,
Eleanor Jorden's
Japanese: The Spoken Language, uses her
JSL romanization, a system strongly influenced by
Kunrei-shiki in its adherence to Japanese phonology, but it is adapted to teaching proper pronunciation of Japanese phonemes.
Kunrei-shiki spellings of kana Notes • In the table above, characters in red are obsolete in modern Japanese. • Much like
Hepburn and unlike
Nihon-shiki: • When () is used as a particle, it is written as , not . • When () is used as a particle, it is written as , not . • () is used only as a particle, written . • Vowels that are separated by a morpheme boundary are not considered to be a long vowel. For example, is written
omou, not *
omô, or *
omō for Hepburn. • Syllabic
n () is written as
n before vowels and
y but as
n before consonants and at the end of a word. • Much like : • Long vowels are indicated by a circumflex accent, for example: long
o is written
ô. Similarly, Hepburn uses a
macron:
ō. •
Geminate consonants are always marked by doubling the consonant following the
sokuon (). • The first letter in a sentence and all proper nouns are capitalized. • ISO 3602 has the strict form; see
Nihon-shiki.
Permitted exceptions The Cabinet Order makes an exception to the above chart: • In international relations and situations for which prior precedent would make a sudden reform difficult, the spelling given by Chart 2 may also be used: The exceptional clause is not to be confused with other systems of romanization (such as
Hepburn) and does not specifically relax other requirements, such as marking long vowels. == See also ==