Paste a Japanese text, and the reading of each kanji appears above it in small hiragana, the way Japanese books for children and for learners print them. Take the result as a web page (ruby HTML), as plain text with the readings in brackets, or print it. Your text never leaves your computer.

Try an example:
Which kanji get furigana
(only the harder kanji get readings)

Nothing you enter leaves your computer.

The first time, the page loads its dictionary (about 17 MB), which can take a little while. After that it is quick.

What Furigana Are

Most kanji can be read in more than one way, and a reader meets a few thousand of them. So Japanese has long printed the reading beside a kanji in small kana when the reader may need it: in books for children, in newspapers for rare characters and names, on signs at stations, in manga for younger readers. These small readings are called furigana (振り仮名), roughly "kana added alongside". Above 蛙（かえる） (frog) the reading tells you it is kaeru.

For a learner of Japanese they turn a page you cannot yet read into a page you can read aloud, and look up word by word. For a Japanese reader they make a notice readable by a child, or a name by a stranger.

Choosing Which Kanji

Children in Japan learn 1,026 kanji in their six years of primary school, a set list for each year: 80 in the first, 160 in the second, and so on. Choose a grade, and the kanji taught up to that year are left plain, so only the harder ones carry readings, as in a Japanese school textbook. Or keep furigana only for kanji outside the jōyō list, the 2,136 kanji of everyday writing, as newspapers do.

How to Use

  1. Paste a Japanese text into the box (up to 5,000 characters).
  2. Choose which kanji get furigana: every kanji, only those above a school grade, or only those outside the jōyō list.
  3. Press "Add Furigana". The text appears with its readings. Copy it as ruby HTML for a web page, or with the readings in brackets for anywhere else, or print it.

Example: 蛙の言葉が、わかりますように。 becomes 蛙（かえる）の言葉（ことば）が、わかりますように。

The readings are found automatically with a dictionary. Names of people and places, and words whose reading changes with their meaning, can come out wrong; please check the result before you share an important text.

The words and their readings are found with the open-source kuromoji.js (Apache License 2.0) and its dictionary mecab-ipadic: see their licences here and here. The school grades of the kanji come from KANJIDIC2 by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (CC BY-SA 4.0): see here.

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