Katakana / Hiragana Converter

How to Use

Paste or type Japanese text into the input. Choose whether to convert katakana into hiragana or the other way around. Kanji, Latin letters, digits, punctuation, and any other characters are preserved exactly as-is — only the opposite kana class is touched. A character count breakdown shows how much of each kana is present so you can verify the conversion.

Katakana and Hiragana

Japanese uses two parallel syllabaries: hiragana (ひらがな) for native words, grammatical particles, and inflections, and katakana (カタカナ) for loanwords, foreign names, onomatopoeia, and emphasis. The two scripts cover the same set of 46 basic sounds plus modified forms, so a lossless one-to-one mapping exists between them in Unicode.

How the Conversion Works

Hiragana occupies the Unicode range U+3041..U+3096, and katakana occupies U+30A1..U+30F6. The two ranges are exact mirrors of each other, offset by 96 codepoints. Converting from katakana to hiragana subtracts 0x60 from each katakana codepoint; converting the other way adds 0x60. Every other character is passed through unchanged, so mixed text (kanji + kana + Latin) round-trips cleanly.

Common Use Cases

• Japanese-language learners switching text between the two kana systems to practice reading.
• Preparing text for applications that accept only one kana system (e.g., certain furigana displays).
• Normalizing user input where katakana and hiragana should be treated as the same token.
• Creating emphasis variants of existing words by converting hiragana loanword-style to katakana.
• Testing search or sort behavior by feeding the same text in both kana forms.

Tips

• The conversion preserves everything else — kanji, English, numbers, and punctuation stay untouched.
• Small kana (ぁぃぅぇぉっゃゅょ / ァィゥェォッャュョ) are converted correctly, as are dakuten and handakuten forms (がぱ / ガパ).
• Half-width katakana (ｱｲｳｴｵ) is NOT converted — use the full-width / half-width converter first if needed.
• Extended hiragana U+3099..U+309A (combining dakuten marks) is not remapped; it stays as-is.
• The tool is lossless: converting hiragana → katakana → hiragana returns the original text.

Privacy

All conversions happen in your browser. Your text is never sent to any server or stored anywhere.