How to read Japanese websites in romaji with Read in Romaji
Read in Romaji is a local browser reading aid. It detects Japanese text on a page and adds romaji reading guides so you can keep reading with less friction.
After installation, Read in Romaji works in 3 basic steps
Install the extension
Once the browser-store version is live, install Read in Romaji from its store listing. Brave users will be able to use the Chrome version.
Navigate to any Japanese page
Open any webpage that contains text-based Japanese content, such as a news site, article, blog, forum, or reference page. Read in Romaji detects Japanese tokens without extra setup.
Read with romaji
Romaji appears in Dual Mode above the Japanese text. Read at your own pace, then turn it off whenever you want to read without support.
Fast, local, and built for offline reading
Understanding how the extension works can help you see what it does — and what it does not do.
Local text processing
When a page loads, the extension scans the page for Japanese text such as kanji, hiragana, and katakana. This happens locally in your browser using a bundled Japanese morphological analyzer.
No text is sent to a server.
Word-level segmentation
Japanese doesn't use spaces between words, so knowing where one word ends and the next begins is a non-trivial problem. The extension uses a dictionary-based tokenizer to segment text correctly before applying romaji readings.
This helps the extension produce more accurate readings for standard written Japanese, though no reading aid can guarantee perfect accuracy in every edge case.
Non-destructive DOM injection
Romaji is injected as <ruby> elements — the HTML standard for phonetic annotations. These wrap the original text without modifying or replacing it. If you copy text from the page, you get the original Japanese, not the romaji.
Dynamic page support
Read in Romaji uses a MutationObserver to watch for new content added to the page after the initial load — essential for social feeds, infinite scroll pages, and single-page applications. New Japanese text is annotated automatically.
What Read in Romaji is not
Being clear about scope helps you decide if this is the right tool for you.
Not a translator
Read in Romaji is a transliteration tool. It helps you read Japanese text in romaji, but it does not translate Japanese into another language.
Not a flashcard app
There's no spaced-repetition or vocabulary tracking. It's a passive reading aid — it makes the text readable, and you bring your own study habits.
Not a teacher
It won't explain grammar, pitch accent, or cultural context. Think of it as training wheels — useful while you build confidence, removable when you don't need it.
Built for text, not images or video
Read in Romaji only converts text-based Japanese content. It does not convert image files, scanned PDFs, video, or other image-based media. If the Japanese content is part of an image rather than selectable text, this is not the right tool for that use case.
See it for yourself
Install the extension and open any Japanese page. It takes less than a minute.